And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished for many years.

Written in the form of a mystery novel, the book consists of alternating chapters by each author writing as a different character. Burroughs (as William Lee, the pseudonym he would later use for his first published book, Junkie) writes the character "Will Dennison" while Kerouac (as "John Kerouac"), takes on the character of "Mike Ryko".^[1][2]

According to the book The Beat Generation in New York by Bill Morgan, the novel was based upon the killing of David Kammerer who was obsessed with Lucien Carr. Carr stabbed Kammerer to death in a drunken fight, in self defense by some accounts, then dumped Kammerer's body into the Hudson River. Carr later confessed the crime, first to Burroughs, then to Kerouac, neither of whom reported it to the police. When Carr eventually turned himself in, Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as accessories after the fact. Kerouac served some jail time because his father refused to bail him out but Burroughs was bailed out by his family. (Kerouac married Edie Parker while in jail, and she then paid his bail.)^[3]

As a consequence of his experiences related to the Kammerer/Carr case, Burroughs became addicted to morphine.

In later years, Burroughs did not consider And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks worth retrieving from obscurity. In the 1986 documentary What Happened to Kerouac? he dismissed it as "not a distinguished work." According to his longtime companion James Grauerholz numerous attempts were made by Kerouac and others to get the book published, until Burroughs brought a lawsuit over the use of quotations from the manuscript that appeared in New York magazine in 1976; the suit, which was settled in the 1980s, established the ownership of the work.^[4]. When Burroughs died in 1997, Grauerholz became the executor of his estate, with responsibility for the disposition of his unpublished works. He had befriended Lucien Carr and agreed not to publish the manuscript in Carr's lifetime. Carr's death in 2005 made way for the book to be published at last.^[5].

Penguin Books published the novel in November 2008.^[6][7] An American edition was published by Grove Press.

The book's title allegedly comes from a news broadcast, heard by Burroughs, about a fire at the St Louis Zoo during which the announcer broke into hysterics on reading the line. However, in his afterword to the 2008 publication, James Grauerholz indicated that the origin of the title is unconfirmed and may have been related to a zoo incident in Egypt, or possibly even a fire that occurred at a circus.^[8]

Sources

• Website with quote from Beat Generation in New York describing the incident that inspired the novel.
• And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, Penguin books, ISBN 9781846141645

References and footnotes