Kerouac and Burroughs’s And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
Jack Kerouac & William S. Burroughs
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
Penguin Classics, 2008
224 pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1846141645
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Although completed in 1945, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, the long-awaited book by Beat icons William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, written before either of them gained superstar status, was finally published this past November. With Burroughs and Kerouac writing alternate chapters as “Will Dennison” and “Mike Ryko” respectively, the novel traces the aimless, peripatetic lives of a group of friends, focusing on the volatile relationship between Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen (based on the real life Lucien Carr and David Kamerrer, who were integral parts of the embryonic Beat group). Although Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s description of this failed (and ultimately fatal) relationship is careful and poignant, And the Hippos is more than just a simple narrative of love gone wrong. Carr did much to establish the overarching rebelliousness of the Beats, providing them with a guiding philosophy that questioned the traditional middle-class value system, and Phillip (based on Carr) proposes an identical philosophy, which he introduces early on and returns to periodically. Thus, Carr’s Weltanschauung, which formed the basic tenet of Beat, lies at the heart of this book.
And the Hippos can be seen as the literary equivalent of a fantasy football team that combines the talents of players who never had a chance to play on the same side. Just as the team members’ disparate playing styles might result in a performance well below expectations, there was the possibility that a book by these two giants of Beat might have been a failure—one that looked like two books that had been artlessly welded into one. Fortunately, And the Hippos is no such failure. Despite having been written by writers with differing styles, each chapter moves fluidly from one to the next, Burroughs’s terse, disinterested writing serving as a neat counterpoint to Kerouac’s more verbose enthusiasm.
Akshay Bareja is a D.Phil. student at Exeter College studying Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
