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WSB and Kerouac's book will be published this fall by Penguin Classics:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... uac102.xml

A novel co-written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two giants of the "Beat Generation" of poets, writers and drug-takers, is to be published for the first time more than 60 years after it was written.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945, was inspired by an actual killing which led to the arrest of both authors.

The novel draws upon the stabbing in 1944 of a homosexual, David Kammerer, by Lucien Carr, a friend of the duo and another Beat leading light.

Carr served two years after admitting manslaughter, claiming Kammerer had been obsessed with him and had become violent.

Carr confessed to Kerouac and Burroughs, who helped him dispose of the knife but did not go to police. Kerouac was arrested as an accessary to the killing in 1944 and was put in a Bronx jail but he was freed after his girlfriend, Edie Parker, stood bail.

Burroughs was arrested but escaped incarceration after his father put up bail.

The book's publication will be a cause célèbre, given the enduring appeal of the authors. It is understood legal wranglings within the Kerouac estate are the reason it has not been published before, although neither writer was keen for that to happen. In a documentary Burroughs described it as "not a distinguished work".

Gerald Nicosia, who wrote Memory Babe, the widely recognised definitive biography of Kerouac, said the pair would find it funny such a juvenile work was seeing the light of day.

"This was one of the first books they wrote... it's probably pretty bad. But I'm not surprised it is being published now because it's a sure-fire way of making money," he said.

Kerouac, considered the father of the Beat Generation, wrote his classic On The Road in 1951 and died at 47 in 1969 of liver cirrhosis. Burroughs, who wrote The Naked Lunch, died in 1997 at 83. Carr died in 2005, aged 79.

I liked what I read in "Word Virus", liked it a lot, I found it similar in style to "Junky", only about the Beats... perhaps if he had follow through the Naked Lunch series would have been called "beat junky queer"
Next year should be very exciting for Burroughs fans, any idea what's coming out of Ohio, Cities mss., Boy Scout or Gysin letters?

I saw this post yesterday and then, ironically, last night coincidentally watched the very same years-old Kerouac doc (got it from a local library to see the Burroughs interviews in it - it's imaginatively entitled 'Kerouac' and was so old it was on videotape) that the "not a distinguished work" quote came from.

"It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness." - Repo Man.

G.

I haven't heard anything about what OSU's next project will be. However, I do think 2008 - 2009 will be good years for Burroughs fans. A lot of material will be coming out, and hopefully the Burroughs archive at the NYPL will be exhibited somehow.

Paul, you make an interesting point about "beat junky queer." That would have been some trilogy.

I just reread the excerpt from Hippos in Word Virus. It reads exactly like what it is -- meaning that it's totally Burroughsian but not as crisp as Junky. It'll be fascinating to see what the rest of it's like.

For those of you who don't know the first thing about the text, refer to Word Virus and/or Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Hi ... heir_Tanks

Wow, I missed this place for a few weeks... What great news! I already let my big Kerouac buddy know that we are sharing a purchase in the near future. I wasn't completely bowled over by the bits in Word Virus, but as it was just that, snippets, I haven't taken much stock in that, I am excited to read the full text.

James G, where's your biography?

Well . . . Hippos now has a cover:

http://www.amazon.com/Hippos-Were-Boile ... 005&sr=1-1


here is the product info:

Product Description:
More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac sat down inNew York City to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. The two authors were then at the dawn of their careers, having yet to write anything of note. Alternating chapters and narrators, Burroughs and Kerouac pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence. The manuscript, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks after a line from a news story about a fire at a circus, was submitted to publishers but rejected and confined to a filing cabinet for decades. This legendary collaboration between two of the twentieth centuries most influential writers is set to be published for the first time in the fall of 2008. A remarkable, fascinating piece of American literary history, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is also an engrossing, atmospheric novel that brings to life a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation.



I can't imagine that it will be good, in the sense of being well written especially when compared to their later work, but it will be interesting to read to simply put the piece into the context of their lives and what we know about them.

224 pages... not bad, unless it is bookmarked by some lengthy criticism and redundant, easily available biographical information about the murder- which it almost certainly is. I like the cover though, plain and straightforward, as if you're reading a mss. and not a novel, let it remain unpublished in the collective unconscious...

The other interesting story is the emergence of yet another new Kerouac book: "Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha" http://www.amazon.com/Wake-Up-Buddha-Ja ... 16-7823304 did anyone else hear anything about this coming to publication???

Really, there needs to be a better means for the Kerouac Estate, as well as publishers on getting the information out to the fans!

Argh, I'm going to have to buy this. Drat. Have Prof. Harris and OSU made up yet?

Hippos has nothing to do with OSU and nothing official to do with Prof. Harris. I believe James Grauerholz is helping to edit Hippos from the Burroughs perspective. I don't know what Kerouac editor is attached to the project.

Does anybody know how and why Burroughs and Kerouac came up with that title for a book about the Carr-Kamerere case?

The title was from a real incident where a zoo went on fire and the hippos really did boil; Burroughs & Kerouac read about it in the paper. How that applies to the stalker murder case, though, is open to speculation.

G.

Yes, Mr Rae is correct about the source of the title, I think. I seem to remember reading about it somewhere. I am sure one of the main bios on WSB goes into it a bit and says that WSB and JK liked the absurdist, surrealist and general catchiness of the title. So I guess they found it amusing and quirkily satisfying that it does not really apply terribly well to the contents of the book. Interestingly, this approach in the selection of the title foreshadows much of WSB's later work in various ways. In particular I think he used some similarly serendipitously found text that he arbitrarily utilised for the chapter headings of ‘Cities of the Red Night’. (Which probably explains why they don't always make a hell of a lot of sense.)

Nevertheless I imagine that in this case the title of the book poetically applies to the awful feelings that those caught up in the incidents apparently described therein felt either for themselves or their friends. Maybe Mr Carr in particular felt he was 'boiling in his tank' rather... even if he did not identify much with any Hippos in particular…

It is a shame that Mr Carr did not quite live long enough to see the publication of this book and offer his thoughts on it. However it may be to some extent or other because of his demise (as well as that of the authors) that we have the book at last being published at all.

Let's hope it is not too bad a read. I think WSB and AJ dismissed it completely as having no value. But then if they really thought it was complete and utter shit they would have destroyed the manuscript, surely?

I'd wager to say that it's definitely because of Lucien that we're going to see this book this fall. I remember reading in "Jack's Book" that once Lucien heard of the mss., he demanded it to be burnt. Is it any good? Would they have destroyed it?

I'm sure WSB was aware what kind of cash cow this unpublished collaboration would be, if he could only outlive them all, it would be quite the nest egg... and Ti Jean? well he didnt throw out much of anything, he and Allen were real hoarders of mss. and I dont think I heard of them throwing out anything.

Writers never destroy anything they've spent time and effort and energy on. If it's bad it's a learning experience, and maybe can be cannibalized for use later on somewhere down the line if they're short of lines.

G.

huh? altho that's true on most occasions, there are some things that must be destroyed. what was it burroughs said: something like, "i've written stuff so bad that when i read it over later, i had to tear it into tiny little pieces, and then throw it away in someone else's garbage can."