The most cinematic way to begin a book about the Beats is with a murder. It’s easy enough to establish the scene by imagining upper Manhattan’s Riverside Park in the close and humid early hours of August 14, 1944. There and then, on the grassy banks of the Hudson, Lucien Carr, a Columbia University sophomore, found himself in a drunken argument with his friend David Kammerer. The men had known each other for years, and after Carr had matriculated at Columbia, the older Kammerer trailed him to New York, where they both fell into a social circle of students and others interested in art, literature, and culture – and the more carnal pleasures of drugs, alcohol, and sex. Whatever transpired between them that night, we remember it now because Carr wound up stabbing Kammerer in the chest with his old Boy Scout knife, and then dragged the body into the river, where it sank only with the help of stones found nearby. At a loss for what to do next, Carr went straight to others in the social circle, first to William Burroughs, who gave him some cash and advised him to seek legal counsel, and then to Jack Kerouac, who accompanied Carr on a surreal tour of the city before the latter eventually turned himself in to authorities. In the papers, the sensational story punctuated unending dispatches from the Pacific and European fronts, updating readers when Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses. Another close friend, Allen Ginsberg, managed to avoid legal entanglements but was as devastated as they all were, striking a plaintive note in his journal: “The libertine circle is destroyed with the death of Kammerer.”1 Although the killing did have the direct effect of busting up the circle and dispersing the friends to far-flung locales, at least temporarily, from our vantage it is historically significant because it draws together, in a most lurid and spectacular way, the Big Three writers of what was not yet called the Beat Generation. In fifteen years, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs would all be famous avatars of literary iconoclasm, and so this early incident seems a natural starting point for understanding the movement they engendered.
Were it not for the later fame of those involved, Kammerer’s death would almost certainly have been lost to history as one among countless forgotten tragedies of the urban nightscape. From at least the mid-1970s, when critical work on the Beats began to appear with some regularity, the Carr–Kammerer confrontation provided a recognizable origin story, as in Aaron Latham’s gossipy New York Magazine piece, “The Columbia Murder That Gave Birth to the Beats” (1976), which dubs Carr the “founding father of the movement,” through to The Typewriter Is Holy (2010), Bill Morgan’s “complete, uncensored history” of the Beats, which declares that the murder is where “the story of the Beat Generation really begins.”2 In such cases, the seamy contours of real life are what captivate, and the desire to learn more about the details might drive inquisitive minds to the literature – Kill Your Darlings, a 2013 feature film about these events, virtually ignores writing to dramatize instead, as its tagline announced, “A True Story of Obsession and Murder.”3 Although many a reader has cracked a Beat book to discover the “true story” of its author’s turbulent life, so doing reinforces the widespread but erroneous notion that these writers merely wrote down what happened to them transparently and with little discrimination. This assumption is flawed, and leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the Beats. Real-life events notwithstanding, they are of course relevant today – of interest to readers, enshrined at their own dedicated museum, subjects of admiring films and countless tribute songs, and paid serious attention in scholarly books, biographies, and at academic conferences – not for their exploits alone but for the force of their writing, which excelled at mythologizing and elevating such exploits. When thinking about the Beats, it is therefore essential to foreground questions of representation, to recognize that however much real life inspired and informed literary production, their achievement rests finally in the nature of this production, in the distinctive ways they explored and experimented with language.
I begin with a murder, then, not because writers later celebrated were embroiled in scandal, but because it was the first event that Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs collectively wrote about, which in turn made it a founding moment in and of Beat lore. A mere six weeks after Carr was sentenced for his crime, for example, eighteen-year-old Ginsberg began drafting a novel inspired by Kammerer’s murder called “The Bloodsong.” That manuscript didn’t get very far because the beset administration at Columbia asked Ginsberg to drop the project, but he would return to the incident more indirectly in later work, notably “Howl” (published 1956), which includes among its subterranean catalogues “great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion.”4 The “oblivion” here refers both to Kammerer’s literal death and to the way Ginsberg had moved from the quasi-ethnographic account in “The Bloodsong” to a lyrical though oblique reference in “Howl,” where Carr and Kammerer remain unnamed but “crowned with laurel” against the romantic wash of moonlight. Like many lines in “Howl,” the specifics of the “suicidal dramas” are purposively left unsaid, contributing to the event’s subsequent status as something only insiders really knew about.
While “The Bloodsong” was abandoned, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, Kerouac and Burroughs decided to collaborate on their own novel about the incident, so it is fair to say that if the killing “destroyed” the circle, it also provided these three writers with generative material (corresponding from jail that September, Carr told Ginsberg that he also wanted to lay claim to the event in an autobiographical novel he was planning).5 By the winter of 1944, Kerouac and Burroughs were making headway on their novel, ultimately called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which featured alternately written chapters narrated by fictionalized versions of themselves. The book was drafted by spring of 1945, and Kerouac for one thought highly of it, boasting to his sister that Columbia Pictures wanted movie rights, but that, despite its dramatic content, Hippos wasn’t really “movie material” so much as a “portrait of the ‘lost’ segment of our generation, hardboiled, honest, and sensationally real.”6 While both collaborators were interested in the commercial viability of the novel – perhaps explaining its “hardboiled” quality – it is telling that Kerouac frames the effort in terms of the “‘lost’ segment of our generation,” as this phrase draws a line from an earlier literary era, the Lost Generation, to his own “generation,” a word that would be famously attached to “Beat” in the coming years.7
Kerouac’s sense that there was a wider generational story to be told via the Carr–Kammerer affair was persistent enough that soon after Hippos was written, he reimagined the material in a new project called “I Wish I Were You.” Never published as a stand-alone book, “I Wish I Were You” focuses on social context rather than on the “sensationally real” murder – the plot is in fact all prelude to the killing, another telling change as it suggests it was the portrait of his “generation” which seemed most consequential to Kerouac on second thought.8 In rereading Kerouac’s body of work, one might indeed be struck by the way the killing indexes wider cultural discontent in a range of books, as when it appears, sanitized, in his first published novel, The Town and the City (1950) or when in his masterpiece Visions of Cody (1951–1952; published 1972), a fascinated Neal Cassady wants to know about the “novel … about the death.”9 A bookend to Hippos, Kerouac’s last substantive work, Vanity of Duluoz (1967), devotes a lengthy section to those months in 1944 not merely because of the murder but because his experiences with the legal system shaped his sensibility as a young writer.10 (Burroughs would likewise characterize the death as somehow symptomatic of his “generation,” as when he wrote in the mid-1950s, “Certainly I would be atypical of my generation if I didn’t die with my boots on. Dave Kammerer stabbed by his boy with a scout knife.”11)
The murder was thus significant not simply because of the obvious personal impact it had on the group but also because it seemed to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs enigmatically indicative of shifting cultural winds, making it all but irresistible as subject matter. Thinking in terms of representation helps us see that the murder as such was immediately spun into a legible story, first by Burroughs, then by the media and by Carr’s lawyers – by the time Burroughs and Kerouac began to draft Hippos, such stories were practically impossible to sort out from the event itself. When Hippos was finally published in 2008, many readers assumed it was nothing more than a straightforward account of what had really happened, but in fact it turns on the very distances between real life and representation, an abiding interest of much Beat writing, as I show throughout this book.12 Put differently, Hippos unsettles the official story circulated in the media and maintained by Carr’s legal defense. This unsettling depends on an interplay of real life and fictional stories, meaning that one cannot read Hippos hermetically, by bracketing biographical and cultural contexts, a truism that applies to essentially all Beat literature. But even if one accepts this truism as such, it does not in turn follow that Hippos is naïve history, real life with the names changed, but it is rather an exploration of the problems that come with representing anything via language. For these reasons, Hippos is a useful entry point into Beat literature – while far from the finest example of this literature, the collaborative novel is a rich illustration of how the Beats have been handcuffed to both media accounts of their “generation” and to the perceptions of their most strident critics, and so I’ll linger over some of its details before describing the wider literary and cultural landscape from which Beat writing emerged.
1.1 Unsettling the Official Story
From a literary historian’s point of view, Hippos sutures New York in 1944 – a place and time in which the Beat Generation was embryonic and as-yet unnamed – to the post-“Howl,” post–On the Road (1957), post–Naked Lunch (1959) literary landscape in which Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and others were characterized as Beat, which meant that they became somewhat infamous but widely misunderstood. This is because though completed in 1945, the manuscript remained unpublished until 2008, three years after Carr’s death. There are numerous reasons for this half-century interlude, not the least of which was Carr’s desire to disassociate himself from the Beats and their fascination with the murder – “Isn’t it enough that the past is there,” he said to Ginsberg in 1962, “without your returning again and again and again to nuzzle, smell, wallow, guzzle and paint yourself blue with it? … As far as it affects me, can’t you word bandiers stick to your own ghosts and leave mine alone?”13 Given the allure of such ghosts, it was perhaps inevitable that they would eventually be disturbed again, and Beat enthusiasts had long anticipated the manuscript’s publication, as it had been alluded to in biographies and other criticism, and evoked by Kerouac in one of his last interviews as a kind of buried treasure still “hidden under the floorboards.”14 When finally published, Hippos was accompanied by a lengthy afterword by James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s literary executor, who rightly pointed out: “For better or worse, Hippos comes to you now as a ‘framed’ work: The Columbia murder that gave birth to the Beats! A lost Kerouac book! A lost Burroughs book!”15 This observation was borne out by the novel’s reception, which tended to be lukewarm and focused on the intimate biographical details it supposedly provided.
To find a visible critical reaction we need look no further than Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review, which panned Hippos for being little more than poorly written gossip. Calling Hippos a “flimsy piece of work,” Kakutani laments that none of its “one-dimensional slackers are remotely interesting as individuals,” but concedes that it captures “the seedy, artsy world Kerouac and Burroughs inhabited in New York … before they found their voices and became bohemian brand names.”16 Such a perspective certainly fulfills Grauerholz’s prediction that readers would be drawn to the novel because of the “brand names” attached to it, and Kakutani imagines these readers happily combing chapters for biographical and historical tidbits.
But Kakutani’s perspective assumes that Hippos is best understood as an historical relic, even though its very form evades claims to historical knowledge. Although inspired by the murder and featuring characters recognizably drawn from real life, Hippos exists in generic limbo somewhere between fiction, history, and autobiography, and is conspicuously coy about its central motivating plot point: Why did one friend kill another?
With respect to the real-life murder, the standard line for several decades was that Kammerer had a dangerous obsession with the much-younger Carr, who finally had no choice but to violently fend off unwelcome sexual advances. This is the story told, for instance, in John Tytell’s Naked Angels (1976), a groundbreaking and widely cited study of the Big Three Beat writers:
Using incorrigible deceptions, he [Kammerer] had relentlessly pursued Carr to New York, declaring his love and his desire to possess him exclusively. He would shadow Carr about the streets, haunt the bars that he frequented, ingratiate himself with his friends, and suddenly appear at parties. On August 13, 1944, after an evening of drinking at the West End, Kammarer [sic] accosted Carr in Riverside Park, insisting that they make love. Carr retaliated by stabbing his antagonist repeatedly in the chest with his scout knife.17
This general narrative is repeated in most subsequent accounts, which tend to emphasize both Kammerer’s “obsession” and “reckless” behavior, and that Carr was far younger and, as Ginsberg’s biographer puts it, “decisively heterosexual.”18 There is little doubt that Kammerer was romantically interested in Carr, but it is worth pointing out that while the scenario Tytell describes is plausible, it is not finally verifiable or really knowable. This is what Joyce Johnson notes in her study of Kerouac when she observes, “No one ever knew exactly what happened there, especially what went on in Lucien’s mind – not definitively.”19 As it turns out, it was this very epistemological uncertainty that Kerouac and Burroughs faced as they composed Hippos, which does not grant readers access to the moment of killing – as the authors themselves did not have access – but treats it instead in terms of the stories that were told about it. Rather than looking to Hippos to find out what “really happened,” then, we should read it for the ways it navigates those narratives that were immediately attached to the murder.
In Hippos, characters modeled on Carr and Kammerer are called Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen, respectively. Their story is told by two narrators, Mike Ryko, whose chapters are written by Kerouac, and Will Dennison, whose chapters are written by Burroughs. The story of the “libertine circle” is fictionalized, and details about the killing are changed so as to obscure the novel’s inspiration. One effect of having two first-person narrators is that crucial information depends on perspective and interpretation, which emphasizes the elusive nature of “truth” in the novel. Such elusiveness is underscored formally as readers are never taken to the scene of the crime, but only hear about it third-hand, as Dennison recounts the story as he remembers Tourian telling it.
In one of Dennison’s chapters, readers learn that directly after the murder, Tourian shows up to seek advice, and explains to Dennision what happened:
“I found a hatchet and broke some windows with it.
“Later we were up on the roof. Al [Allen] kept saying he wanted to ship out with me. I got mad and gave him a shove. He nearly went over. He looked at me and said, ‘I want to do the things you do. I want to write poetry and go to sea and all that.’” Phillip stopped and looked at me. “I can see you don’t believe me.”
“Go on,” I [Dennison] said.
“Well, so I said to him, ‘Do you want to die?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ He made a couple of wisecracks and tried to put his arm around me. I still had the hatchet in my hand, so I hit him on the forehead. He fell down. He was dead.”20
Leaving aside for the moment the changes in murder weapon and venue, we might note that nowhere in Dennison’s account of Tourian’s story is Allen threatening or aggressive, and so the motive for his actions remains inexplicable. Far from seeming like a crime of passion or desperation, the killing appears in this telling markedly dispassionate and therefore markedly disturbing: we learn only that Allen “was dead,” not why he was killed.
In fact, it is Dennison who supplies the motive, and the accompanying details that will get Tourian a light sentence in the novel: “Do you know what happened to you, Phil?” Dennison says. “You were attacked. Al attacked you. He tried to rape you. You lost your head. Everything went black. You hit him. He stumbled back and fell off the roof. You were in a panic. Your only thought was to get away. Get a good lawyer, you’ll be out in two years” (163). Historically speaking, this is the story that was repeated in newspapers, accepted by the criminal justice system, and confirmed by biographers and literary critics (and Carr actually did get out of prison in two years).
In Hippos, however, the idea that Tourian was defending himself against Allen’s attempted “rape” is presented not as historical fact but as an invention by Dennison. His short, declarative sentences match those in Tourian’s own account, and Dennison’s opening question, “Do you know what happened to you, Phil?,” is immediately followed by authoritative answers that he himself supplies, casting doubt on their status as “real,” even in the world of the novel. Kerouac’s ensuing chapter also raises such doubts when Ryko notes that “Phillip gave me the story he’d told Dennison earlier in the morning” (169; my emphasis). Ryko then reassures the distraught Tourian by repeating the story once more, like a mantra: “Al was queer. He chased you over continents. He screwed up your life. The police will understand that” (170).
In real life, the police did indeed understand this story, as Carr doubled down on it to make the killing explicable and even justifiable to a largely homophobic culture.21 This was a culture in which homosexuality was a great taboo, seen by many as evidence not simply of immorality but of inhumanity. Consider, for instance, that in the very month of Kammerer’s death, San Francisco poet – and, in later years, Beat associate – Robert Duncan published a brief but significant piece in Politics titled “The Homosexual in Society.” This piece criticized both mainstream society for its homophobia and those living closeted gay lives, taking the latter to task for retreating into cliques rather than demanding human recognition and civil rights from dominant culture.22 In the course of his essay, Duncan refers to another sensational murder case concerning a man named Wayne Lonergan, who had been arrested for bludgeoning his heiress wife with a candelabra. Increasingly desperate during his trial, Lonergan disclosed homosexual relationships as part of his (failed) defense – one Daily News headline read: “Lonergan Alibi: Twisted Sex.”23 Duncan’s thoughts on the Lonergan case might as easily apply to Kammerer’s murder, and help us see those stories attached to it by the lights of mid-century homophobia:
The law has declared homosexuality secret, non-human, unnatural.… The law itself sees in it a crime, not in the sense that murder, thievery, seduction of children or rape is seen as a crime – but in an occult sense. In the recent Lonergan case it was clear that murder was a human crime, but homosexuality was non-human. It was not a crime against man but a crime against “the way of nature,” as defined in the Christian religion, a crime against God.24
If Duncan’s analysis is even broadly accurate, and I think it is, then the New York Times coverage of Kammerer’s death adheres perfectly to this cultural logic. The Times first established Carr as “a quiet, well-behaved, intellectual type” and Kammerer simply as “a homosexual,” then presented a version of the story much like the one Dennison suggests to Tourian in Hippos:
Carr said that several times during their acquaintance Kammerer had made improper advances toward him but that he had always rebuffed the older man.… [The night of the murder] Kammerer once more made an offensive proposal.… Carr said that he rejected it indignantly and that a fight ensued … [the] slight youth … [was] no match for the burly former physical education instructor … [and so] In desperation, Carr pulled out of his pocket his Boy Scout knife, a relic of his boyhood.25
This story was refined by Carr’s legal defense, who insisted that Kammerer had “hounded” Carr and overwhelmed him with “improper advances.”26 In real life, then, homosexuality – according to the logic Duncan describes a “secret, non-human, unnatural” crime against humanity – was invoked so as to make manslaughter understandable if not acceptable, and this story was repeated so often that it seemed, in the end, unvarnished truth. In its coverage of Carr’s sentencing that October, for instance, the Daily Mirror reported that the judge declared that a jury would likely have acquitted Carr, and that the Elmira Reformatory “may release him when he has entirely recovered from the evil influence to which he had been subjected.”27 In this narrative, Carr is fixed as the straight victim to Kammerer’s homosexual predation, which, bearing out Duncan’s theories, is construed as a crime far worse than murder.
But this is not the case in Hippos, where the truth refuses to be fixed so neatly. There are, for instance, numerous suggestions that Tourian’s sexuality is more fluid than Dennison’s cover story allows: Ryko observes that “a lot of people … looked at him suspiciously as if they thought he might be a dope fiend or a fag” (14), and wonders why, despite “necking with her for months” (128), Tourian and a girlfriend never actually have sex (43). Burroughs’s chapter echoes this fluidity, as when the pair frequent “queer place[s]” (101) or when Dennison tells a lovesick Allen that “Phillip isn’t queer. He might sleep with you, which I doubt altogether, but anything permanent is impossible” (28). This conversation proposes a distinction between one’s sexual behavior and being identified a “fag” or a “queer” (categories that Burroughs would explore more subtly in later work), with both Ryko and Dennison indicating that while Tourian “might sleep” with men, he isn’t “queer.”
The most striking challenge to the official narrative about the murder comes when Hippos offers the exact inverse of the cover story suggested by Dennison: that it was Tourian, not Allen, who was the sexual aggressor. Early in the novel, Allen comes to Dennison to tell him about another incident between Tourian and Allen that took place on a rooftop (thus implying a parallel to the rooftop murder); as Allen recounts to Dennison:
“Well, when we got up on the roof, Phillip rushed over to the edge like he was going to jump off, and I got worried and yelled at him, but he stopped suddenly and dropped a glass down. I went over and stood on the edge with him and said ‘What’s the matter?’ and started to put my arm around him. Then Phil turned around and kissed me very passionately, on the mouth, and dragged me down with him on the roof.”
I [Dennison] said, “It looks like you’re getting there, after four years. Well go on – what happened then?”
“He kissed me several times, then suddenly he pushed me away and got up.”
The novel never demonstrates – or even hints – that Allen is lying here, retaining the possibility that he and Tourian had a romantic relationship about which Tourian was conflicted, in turn suggesting that shame, not self-defense, could have been the true motive for the murder. In other words, unlike the official narrative of the real-life event, its fictionalization in Hippos introduces competing stories that account for Allen’s murder, but refuses to verify any of them, rendering it finally inexplicable.
1.2 The Beats, Evasion, and the Underground
The enigma at the heart of Hippos helps us see how the book and the circumstances of its composition draw together three threads that characterize Beat literature broadly imagined. First, we have a group of writers emphasizing the precarious relationship between language and “the real” in an attempt to define themselves against representations by the media, a mirror and mouthpiece of dominant culture. It is possible to trace this emphasis through much Beat writing, and as I explain throughout this book, in order to see Beat writers collectively, one has to account for popular representations of them as such, including by journalists and critics generally dismissive of them.
Second, there is the sense that these competing representations are not merely semantic squabbles, but rather that they have serious consequences in people’s lives: obviously, Carr himself was affected by the way his relationship with Kammerer was represented in public, but similar representations had wider impacts on various kinds of “underground” cultures that existed at the time. As the Carr–Kammerer story may suggest, there were from those early days blurred lines between underground queer culture and what would become the Beat underground, a notion that may surprise readers who see the avatar of the Beat Generation in On the Road’s womanizing protagonist. Maria Damon has framed these blurred lines like this: “What the Beats did for the gay community was goad it into visibility – a visibility that would eventually become politicized – by exemplifying flamboyant resistance to an oppressive norm. What the gay culture did for the Beats was to offer them a model for fluid relationships, outlaw culture and a high regard for the relatively apolitical politics of ‘lifestyle.’”28 As elaborated throughout this book, Damon’s final point about the politicizing of lifestyle is absolutely central to understanding the Beats and their contributions to US letters and culture. Their lives and literatures resisted hard distinctions among the personal and political, private and public, in ways that would shift the very meaning of what “politics” could mean or be – a shift that became in later decades very nearly mainstream.
Third, there is the sense that what made the Beats a group, whether a tight-knit “libertine circle” or seemingly diffuse generation or movement, was their evasions of dominant culture. But despite such evasions, it became difficult – probably impossible – to discuss the counterculture without discussing dominant culture, meaning that Beat counterculture became collectively visible when seen against dominant culture, even as this collectivity was never itself entirely cohesive or internally consistent.
In light of these three threads, we might see how Hippos is a prototypically Beat, underground book. For now, I’ll use the term “underground” broadly, and will wait until Part II to detail the historical specificities and shades of meaning necessary for understanding how the Beat sensibility emerged from the New York underground of the mid- to late 1940s. In the meantime, it suffices to think in terms reminiscent of those in Dick Hebdige’s influential account of postwar “youth subcultures,” which argues that in such subcultures, style – variously construed but always constitutive – “signals a Refusal” of “dominant ideologies.”29 For Hebdige, refusal is a hallmark of the various subcultures he discusses; in the case of the Beats specifically, I would suggest it was manifest in the particular evasions evinced in Hippos and in the more general evasions of social and cultural ideologies then dominant. After all, in the first public theorization of the Beats (1952), John Clellon Holmes claimed that even in “the wildest hipster, … there is no desire to shatter the ‘square’ society in which he lives, only to elude it.”30 We might then say that the epistemological unsettling staged in Hippos illustrates one of Beat literature’s fundamental premises: that one should approach dominant narratives or ideologies with skepticism, and privilege instead the messier truths of idiosyncratic, subjective experience. But as attention to the very concept of “subculture” reminds us, these individual experiences occurred in the context of a group or community: a “libertine circle” which became a literary coterie, which in time radiated out to a loosely associated movement of regional, then national, then international import. As I explain in the following pages, attending to figurations of community is therefore crucial for understanding the seeming paradox of the Beats as highly individualistic writers who nonetheless constituted a collective underground literary movement.
