San Sebastián
La novela secreta de los beats
En 1944, William Burroughs y Jack Kerouac, por entonces aspirantes a escritores, se vieron envueltos en la estela de un asesinato que escandalizó Nueva York. El episodio inspiró una narración a cuatro manos que permaneció inédita hasta ahora. Además de un fragmento de la obra, ofrecemos la crónica de su gestación y del nacimiento de la contraculturaPor John Walsh
The Independent
Londres, 2008
Los admiradores de la generación beat saben desde hace años de la existencia de la "Novela del Origen", pero tuvieron que esperar la muerte de un periodista de United Press International para verla en letra impresa. La publicación, en noviembre pasado, de And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, [literalmente, "Y los hipopótamos fueron hervidos en sus tanques"] de William S. Burroughs y Jack Kerouac, es un acontecimiento literario, no sólo porque confederó a dos de los tres escritores beat más destacados, sino porque el libro relata una historia –de amistad masculina, obsesión gay y asesinato– que llegó a fascinar a una veintena de escritores estadounidenses. Los lectores que piensan que la obra maestra de Kerouac, En el camino, publicada en 1957, fue su obra de juventud, se asombran al constatar que Hippos... fue escrita en 1944. El protobeat tenía entonces apenas 22 años, y era "un extraño y solitario místico católico" de Lowell, Massachusetts. Su amigo Burroughs, frío, aterrador y entendido en conductas extremas, tenía 30 años; su época de éxito con El almuerzo desnudo y Junkie empezaría más tarde, en 1959. El tercero de esta troika de visionarios "volados", drogones y sexualmente ambiguos era Allen Ginsberg, el desgarbado poeta judío vorazmente homosexual, cuyo innovador libro, Aullido y otros poemas, fue publicado en 1956.
Una década antes de concitar la atención pública, los tres estuvieron implicados en el caso Carr-Kammerer. Un noche del verano de 1943, Ginsberg, estudiante de la Universidad de Columbia, escuchó música procedente de la residencia estudiantil del Union Theological Seminary. Llamó a la puerta y preguntó qué era (el Trío n° 1 de Brahms). El admirador de Brahms era Lucien Carr, de St. Louis, Missouri. Entablaron conversación y se hicieron amigos. Carr llevó a Ginsberg a Greenwich Village y les presentó a David Kammerer y al más viejo amigo de Kammerer, William Burroughs, también originario de St. Louis.
Cuando llegó Navidad, se produjeron encuentros trascendentales. Carr conoció a Edie Parker, una rica mujer de Detroit que era novia de Jack Kerouac. Kerouac estaba ausente, en el mar, pero cuando volvió, Edie se lo presentó a Carr en su casa. Carr llevó a Edie a conocer a Ginsberg y le dio a éste la dirección de Kerouac. El primer encuentro de los héroes beat se produjo, prosaicamente, a la hora del desayuno; los tres hablaron de poesía durante horas y más tarde le hicieron una formal visita conjunta a Burroughs para ver qué podían aprender de él. Fue un banquete literario en permanente expansión.
Durante los meses que siguieron, los nuevos amigos se reunieron en el departamento de Edie de la calle 118 y Avenida Amsterdam. Kerouac se instaló allí a vivir con ella y su compañera de departamento, Joan Vollmer, quien más tarde se casó con Burroughs y terminaría muerta de un disparo en 1951, cuando Burroughs, ebrio, se propuso jugar a Guillermo Tell con ella. Por el momento, sin embargo, era una bendición, al final de una guerra titánica, encontrarse en el núcleo de una nueva generación de escritores.
Los acontecimientos verdaderos en los que se basa el libro ocurrieron durante las primeras horas del lunes 16 de agosto de 1944. Carr y Kammerer caminaban junto al río Hudson en Riverside Park, en el Upper West Side neoyorquino. Lucien Carr tenía 19 años y era esbelto, rubio y apuesto. Kammerer tenía 33, un metro noventa, era atlético y musculoso. Se habían conocido en St Louis en 1936, cuando Carr tenía 11 años, y más tarde se habían visto con frecuencia en la Universidad George Washington, donde Carr había participado en los paseos en bicicleta por entornos naturales que organizaba Kammerer, quien se desempeñaba como instructor de educación física. Kammerer era gay y durante años había estado obsesionado sexualmente por Carr.
Los dos hombres estaban ebrios. Se pelearon y rodaron sobre la hierba. Kammerer hizo lo que los diarios calificaron como "una propuesta indecente", presumiblemente acompañándola con la acción. Carr respondió con furia. Apuñaló dos veces en el pecho a Kammerer con una pequeña navaja de boy-scout. Después puso piedras en el bolsillo del otro y lo arrojó al Hudson.
Terriblemente perturbado, fue a ver a Burroughs, quien le recomendó que le contara lo ocurrido a su familia y que consultara a un abogado. En vez de seguir el consejo, Carr fue a ver a Kerouac, quien estuvo con él todo el día: lo llevó a una galería de arte y al cine a ver el nuevo film de Korda, Las cuatro plumas, y vio cómo el joven se deshacía de la navaja arrojándola a una alcantarilla y de los anteojos del muerto, abandonándolos en el parque.
Incapaz de tolerar la culpa, Carr fue a la policía y confesó su crimen. Los guardacostas encontraron el cuerpo de Kammerer en el río y Carr fue acusado de asesinato en segundo grado. Kerouac fue arrestado como testigo material y se salvó por poco de un cargo por complicidad. Cuando Leo, el padre de Kerouac, se negó a pagar los cien dólares de la fianza de su hijo, Kerouac y Edie se casaron en la cárcel para que la familia de ella pagara la fianza.
El juicio se celebró el 15 de septiembre de 1944 y Lucien Carr fue condenado a un máximo de diez años de cárcel. En cuanto se anunció la sentencia, varios escribas de Nueva York se pusieron a redactar sus versiones del crimen. Ginsberg escribió un borrador de su novela Bloodsong, pero el vicedecano de Columbia lo desalentó, tras decidir que la universidad podía prescindir de una mayor notoriedad. El poeta John Hollander escribió sobre el caso para el Columbia Spectator, el periódico de la universidad. Entre otros que se sintieron intrigados por el homicidio, un crimen pasional gay, se contaron James Baldwin y un joven corrector de la revista The New Yorker llamado Truman Capote.
En octubre de 1944, tras pasar un período con sus padres, Burroughs se mudó a un departamento en Riverside Drive y reanudó sus visitas al departamento que compartían Edie, Joan y Kerouac. Allí fue donde ambos hombres empezaron a colaborar para escribir la novela basada en el asesinato de Kammerer.
Escribieron capítulos alternados, Burroughs como "Will Dennison", un barman de Nueva York, y Kerouac como "Mike Ryko", descripto como "un finlandés pelirrojo, de 19 años, una suerte de marino mercante vestido con sucio uniforme caqui". Aunque muchos de los intereses temáticos y las posteriores obsesiones de Burroughs –drogas, muerte violenta, prostitutas, sexualidad gay, vasos rotos– son evidentes desde el primer momento, el joven Kerouac no se quedó atrás del impávido sabio. "Existía una clara división del material, que establecía quién escribía qué cosa", le dijo Burroughs a su biógrafo Ted Morgan. "No pretendíamos precisión literal, sino tan sólo una aproximación. Nos divertimos escribiendo eso. Por supuesto, lo que escribimos estaba determinado por los hechos reales… es decir, Jack sabía una parte y yo otra. Y ficcionalizamos. En realidad, el crimen se cometió con un cuchillo, no con un hacha. Tuve que disfrazar a los personajes, así que convertí al personaje de Lucien en un turco."
Encontraron una agente, Madeline Brennan, quien elogió el manuscrito y lo hizo circular en algunas editoriales. Durante un tiempo, las cosas parecieron promisorias. El 14 de marzo de 1945, Kerouac le escribió una carta a su hermana Caroline: "Por ser la clase de libro que es (un retrato del segmento ‘perdido’ de nuestra generación, nada sentimental, honesto y sensacionalmente real), es bueno, pero no sabemos si esa clase de libros interesa en este momento, aunque después de la guerra sin duda habrá una verdadera oleada de libros de ‘la generación perdida’ y el nuestro es imbatible en ese campo".
Imaginemos a los editores estadounidenses de 1945 ante todas esas referencias a la droga, las palabras soeces, el contexto gay ("Este Phillip es la clase de muchacho a quien los maricones literarios suelen escribirle sonetos, que empiezan: ‘Oh tú, efebo griego de cabellos color ala de cuervo…") y los momentos alucinatorios (como el pasaje en que dos de los personajes mastican vidrio roto en el capítulo uno), y decidiendo que publicarla sería buscarse demasiados problemas. Ningún editor la aceptó. Burroughs se mostró estoico. "No era suficientemente sensacionalista ni tampoco estaba tan bien escrito ni era suficientemente interesante desde un punto de vista literario. Era algo más bien intermedio. Su espíritu era existencialista, una tendencia que prevalecía en esa época, pero que todavía no había llegado a Estados Unidos. Simplemente, no era comercialmente viable."
Es fácil encontrar al verdadero Kerouac y al verdadero Burroughs escondidos detrás de sus narradores, y ver a Carr y a Kammerer tras las figuras de Phillip Tourian y Ramsay Allen. La conversación en la que Phillip le pregunta a Mike a qué lugar navegará exactamente ahora es un reflejo de lo que Carr podría haberle dicho a Kerouac pocas semanas antes.
Los dos hombres fueron amigos durante toda la vida, pero el libro a veces se interpuso entre ellos. Carr obtuvo su libertad bajo palabra después de dos años de cárcel, se reinventó como Lou Carr, encontró empleo en la agencia de noticias United Press International (UPI), se casó, fundó una familia y trató de bloquear todos los intentos de relatar la historia del homicidio. Pidió que su nombre se eliminara de las dedicatorias (un verdadero honor) que Ginsberg había puesto en Aullido.
Kerouac, mientras tanto, siguió esperando que algún editor publicara Hippos..., cuyo título había sido tomado de la crónica radial sobre un incendio en el zoológico de St. Louis. A fines de la década de 1950 y durante la de 1960, aterrorizó a Carr hablando de la posibilidad de revivir la novela. Finalmente contó la historia con nombres ficticios en su novela autobiográfica Vanity of Duluoz. Luego, una biografía de Kerouac, publicada en 1973 y escrita por Ann Charters, volvió a poner sobre el tapete la muerte de Kammerer, y un artículo de la revista New York, de abril de 1976, incluyó fragmentos de la novela como si fueran hechos reales. Carr se sintió mortificado de que reapareciera su pasado homicida y que sus nuevos colegas pudieran enterarse. Burroughs ayudó a su amigo a demandar a la revista y ganó el derecho de compartir el control sobre el libro en el futuro.
El albacea de Burroughs, James Grauerholz, visitó a Carr tras la muerte de Burroughs en 1997, y le prometió que no autorizaría la publicación de la novela en vida de Carr. Éste murió en 2005 y es por eso que hoy podemos leer este libro.
No es la más sofisticada de las novelas policiales y no muestra a ninguno de los dos escritores en sus mejores momentos. Pero evoca una época, hacia el final de la guerra, y un lugar, Manhattan, que se ha contaminado llenándose de alcohol, prostitutas, marineros, homosexuales y almas perdidas, todos ellos preguntándose cuándo volverá a arrancar el mundo. Es una fascinante instantánea de una época perdida. Si uno está buscando el vínculo entre los impotentes errabundos de posguerra de París era una fiesta, de Ernest Hemingway, los tipos que viven en los bares de Última salida a Brooklyn, de Hubert Selby Jr. y los jóvenes reventados de Menos que cero, de Bret Easton Ellis, ya no tendrá que continuar la búsqueda.
[Traducción: Mirta Rosenberg] LA NACION
The young generation: Burroughs and Kerouac - an unpublished collaboration
In 1944, two aspiring writers named William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were implicated in a murder that scandalised New York. The episode inspired a collaboration, a debut that remained unpublished – until now. John Walsh gives the lowdown on the novel that set them on the road
Monday, 3 November 2008
REX FEATURES
And the Beat goes on: (above) William S Burroughs in Toronto in 1960
Fans of the Beat generation have known for years about The Novel That Kicked It All Off, but they've had to wait until the death of a journalist at United Press International for it to be published. The appearance in print of And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks by William S Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is a literary event, not only because it drew two of the three leading Beat writers into confederacy, but because the book told a story – of male friendship, gay obsession and murder – that came to fascinate a score of American authors. Readers who think Kerouac's 1957 masterpiece On the Road was a young man's book are startled to find that Hippos was written in 1944. The proto-Beat was only 22, a "strange solitary Catholic mystic" from Lowell, Massachusetts. His friend Burroughs, cold, scary and a connoisseur of extreme behaviour, was 30; his years of success with Naked Lunch and Junky came later, in 1959. The third of their troika of strung-out, druggy, sexually ambiguous visionaries was Allen Ginsberg, the gawky, Jewish, voraciously homosexual poet, whose ground-breaking Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956.
A decade before they came to public attention, all were involved in the Carr-Kammerer case. One night in summer 1943, Ginsberg, a Columbia University student, heard music in the dormitory of the Union Theological Seminary. He knocked on the door and asked what it was (Brahms's Trio No 1.) The Brahms fan was Lucien Carr from St Louis, Missouri. They talked and became friends. Carr took Ginsberg to Greenwich Village and introduced him to David Kammerer and to Kammerer's oldest friend, William Burroughs, also from St Louis.
As Christmas approached, momentous meetings occurred. Carr met Edie Parker, a rich Detroit woman and the girlfriend of Jack Kerouac. Kerouac was away at sea but, on his return, Edie introduced him to Carr in her apartment. Carr took Edie to meet Ginsberg, and gave him Kerouac's address. The Beat heroes' first meeting was, prosaically, at breakfast-time; they discussed poetry for hours and later paid a joint formal visit to Burroughs to see what they could learn. It was an ever-expanding literary party.
In the following months, the new friends met in Edie's apartment at 118th Street and Amsterdam Ave. Kerouac came to live with her and her flatmate, Joan Vollman, who later married Burroughs and was shot by him, when a drinking game went wrong, in 1951. For now, though, it was bliss, at the end of a titanic war, to be at the heart of a new generation of writers.
The real-life events behind the book occurred in the early hours of Monday morning, 16 August 1944. Carr and Kammerer were walking beside the Hudson in Riverside Park on New York's Upper West Side. Lucien Carr was 19, slight, blond and good-looking. Kammerer was 33, 6ft tall, athletic, muscular. They'd met in St Louis in 1936, when Carr was 11, and later at George Washington University, when Carr joined nature hikes conducted by Kammerer, the PE instructor. Kammerer was gay and had for years been sexually obsessed with Carr.
Both men were drunk. They quarrelled and rolled on the grass. Kammerer made what the papers called "an indecent proposal", presumably backing it up with action. Carr responded with fury. He stabbed Kammerer twice in the chest with a little Boy Scout knife. Then he put some rocks in the bleeding man's pockets and rolled him into the Hudson.
In disarray, he went to Burroughs, who recommended that he tell his family and consult a lawyer. Instead, he went to see Kerouac, who hung out with him all next day, took him to an art gallery and the new Korda movie The Four Feathers, and watched him dispose of the knife down a sewer and get rid of the dead man's spectacles in the park.
Unable to stand the guilt, Carr went to the police and confessed. Coastguards found Kammerer's body in the river, and Carr was accused of second-degree murder. Kerouac was arrested as a material witness and narrowly missed being charged as an accessory. In an odd twist, when Kerouac's father Leo refused to pay $100 for his son's bail, Kerouac and Edie got married in jail so that her family would pay his bail.
The trial took place on 15 September 1944, and Lucien Carr was sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in jail. No sooner was the sentence announced than several New York scribes began writing their versions of the killing. Ginsberg wrote a draft of The Bloodsong, which recreated Kammerer's last hours, but was discouraged by the assistant dean of Columbia, who decided the university could live without more notoriety. The poet John Hollander wrote about it for the Columbia Spectator. Among others intrigued by the crime-of-passion gay homicide were James Baldwin, and a young copy-boy at the The New Yorker called Truman Capote.
In October 1944, after a period staying with his parents, Burroughs moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive and resumed calling on the apartment shared by Edie, Joan and Kerouac. It was here that the two men began collaborating on their joint novel based on the Kammerer murder.
They wrote alternate chapters, Burroughs as "Will Dennison," a New York bartender, Kerouac as "Mike Ryko," described as "a 19-year-old, red-haired Finn, a sort of merchant seaman dressed in dirty khaki". While many of Burroughs' thematic interests and later obsessions – drugs, violent death, hustlers, gay sex, broken glass – are apparent from an early stage, the young Kerouac held his own against the chilly sage. "There was a clear separation of material as to who wrote what," Burroughs told his biographer, Ted Morgan. "We weren't trying for literal accuracy at all, just some approximation. We had fun doing it. Of course what we wrote was dictated by the actual course of events – that is, Jack knew one thing and I knew another. We fictionalised. The killing was actually done with a knife, it wasn't done with a hatchet at all. I had to disguise the characters, so I made Lucien's character a Turk."
They found an agent, Madeline Brennan, who praised the manuscript and hawked it around some publishers. For a time, things looked promising. On 14 March 1945, Kerouac wrote a letter to his sister Caroline: "For the kind of book it is – a portrait of the 'lost' segment of our generation, hard-boiled, honest and sensationally real – it is good, but we don't know if those kinds of books are much in demand now, although after the war there will no doubt be a veritable rash of 'lost generation' books and ours in that field can't be beat."
You can imagine American publishers in 1945 inspecting the junkie references, the F-words, the gay context ("This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, 'O raven-haired Grecian lad...'") and the hallucinogenic moments – like when two of the characters chew broken glass in Chapter One – and deciding it was too much trouble. None took it on. Burroughs was stoic. "It wasn't sensational enough to make it from that point of view, nor was it well-written or interesting enough to make it from a purely literary point of view. It sort of fell in-between. It was very much in the Existentialist genre, the prevailing mode of the period, but that hadn't hit America yet. It just wasn't a commercially viable property."
It's easy to spot the real Kerouac and Burroughs behind their narrators, and to see Carr and Kammerer behind the figures of Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen. The conversation in which Phillip asks Mike when next he's going to sea exactly mirrors what Carr would have said to Kerouac a few weeks before.
The two men stayed friends for life, but the book sometimes came between them. When Carr was released on parole after serving two years, he reinvented himself as Lou Carr, found a job at UPI, the news service, got married, started a family and tried to block any attempts to re-tell the Columbia manslaughter story. He asked for his name to be removed from the dedication (a signal honour) to Ginsberg's Howl.
Kerouac, meanwhile, kept hoping some publisher would bring out Hippos. In the late 1950s and 1960s, he terrified Carr by talking about reviving it. Eventually he told the story under fictional names in his autobiographical novel, Vanity of Duluoz. Then a 1973 biography of Kerouac by Ann Charters brought up the death of Kammerer, and an article in New York magazine, in April 1976, included extracts from Hippos as if they were hard facts. Carr was mortified to have his homicidal past dragged up for his new colleagues to read. Burroughs helped his friend by suing the magazine, and won the right to share control over the book's future.
Burroughs's executor, James Grauerholz, visited Carr after Burroughs died in 1997 and promised he wouldn't allow publication of the novel while Carr was alive. Carr died in 2005, which is why you can read the book at last.
It's not the most sophisticated crime novel, and it doesn't show either writer at his best. But it evokes a time, towards the end of the war, and a place, Manhattan, that's become sour with drunks, whores, sailors, faggots and lost souls, all wondering when the world is going to re-start. It's a fascinating snapshot from a lost era. If you're looking for the link between Hemingway's impotent post-war drifters in The Sun Also Rises, the barflies and Tralalas of Last Exit to Brooklyn and the zonked-out kids of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, look no further.
To order a copy of 'And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks' by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs for the special price of £18 (free P&P), call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897 or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk
Lucien Carr, a Founder and a Muse of the Beat Generation, Dies at 79
Published: January 30, 2005
Lucien Carr, one of the founders -- and one of the last survivors -- of the Beat Generation of poets and writers, although one who never wrote poetry or novels, died on Friday. He was 79.
Mr. Carr died at George Washington University Hospital after collapsing at his home in Washington, said his son, the writer Caleb Carr. He had suffered from bone cancer in recent years.
A literary lion who never roared, Mr. Carr served as an inspirational muse to a bunch of college chums at Columbia University in the 1940's: the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelists William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, writers who a decade later changed the course of American letters in coffeehouses in San Francisco and New York.
It was Mr. Carr, for example, who introduced Ginsberg to the works of Rimbaud, a major influence on Ginsberg's work, and then introduced Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg. He introduced them all to Neal Cassady, a railway worker with literary ambitions who became part of the Columbia undergraduates' coterie of ''angel-headed hipsters.'' Together they formed the nucleus of what became the Beats.
Any practical assistance Mr. Carr gave to the Beat movement came as an encouraging editor, the profession he pursued for nearly half a century at United Press and United Press International. It was Mr. Carr, for example, who gave Kerouac the roll of teletype paper, pilfered from U.P., on which the author wrote ''On the Road,'' and it was Mr. Carr who was among the first to read the novel and offer advice, which may or may not have been taken. As Ginsberg once said, ''Lou was the glue.''
Chroniclers of the era and biographers of its writers have always had as much trouble placing Mr. Carr in the group snapshot of the Beats as they have had in defining the movement. Both defied description. The one episode all seize upon came while Mr. Carr was still at Columbia. In repulsing the homosexual advances of a hanger-on of the Beat crowd, Mr. Carr stabbed his pursuer with a Boy Scout knife and killed him. Mr. Carr served a brief time in prison for manslaughter, but was later pardoned.
Born in New York but raised in St. Louis, Mr. Carr had boyish good looks that were only enhanced by a slouchy physique and sardonic grin hidden under a riverboat gambler mustache. A motorcycle enthusiast, who took up boating on his retirement, Mr. Carr was a great jazz aficionado and an avid reader for whom the greatest joys in life were in simple things like a long riff on a tenor sax or a well-turned dependent clause.
Shortly after leaving Columbia, Mr. Carr, to the consternation of his fellow Beats, took a job with United Press in New York and spent the rest of his career, until his retirement in 1993, with the wire service, mostly as the news editor supervising the agency's report for morning newspapers. He remained in contact with the Beats, although Kerouac and Cassady died young. Ginsberg remained a close friend until his death in 1997 and often visited Mr. Carr at U.P.I.'s newsroom to lobby for coverage of whatever political cause he was pursuing at the moment.
If he had been more of a midwife to the Beats, Mr. Carr was an extremely vocal mentor to two generations of journalists who came up through the ranks at U.P.I. He was a great champion of brevity. ''Why don't you just start with the second paragraph?'' was his frequent advice to young reporters overly fond of their own prose.
He guided U.P.I.'s coverage of the major stories of the second half of the 20th century from the cold war and the Kennedy assassination to Vietnam and the moon landing.
He was married twice, first to the former Francesca von Hartz, with whom he had three sons: Simon, of New York City; Caleb, of Cherry Plain, N.Y.; and Ethan, of Amherst, Mass. His second wife was the former Sheila Johnson. He is survived by all of them as well as by Kathleen Silvassy, his companion for the last several years of his life.
source :
At the age of 14, Carr met David Kammerer, a man who would have a profound influence on the course of his life. Kammerer was a teacher of English and a physical education instructor at Washington University in St. Louis. Kammerer was a childhood friend of William S. Burroughs, another scion of St. Louis wealth who knew the Carr family. Burroughs and Kammerer had gone to primary school together, and as young men, they traveled together and explored Paris’s night life: Burroughs said Kammerer “was always very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without any middle-class morality.” Kammerer met Carr when he was leading a youth group of which Carr was a member, and quickly became infatuated with the teenager.
Over the next five years, Kammerer pursued Carr, showing up wherever the young man was enrolled at school. Carr would later insist, as would his friends and family, that Kammerer had been hounding Carr sexually with a predatory persistence that would today be considered stalking. Whether Kammerer’s attentions were frightening or flattering to the younger man (or both) is now a matter of some debate among those who chronicle the history of the Beat Generation. What is not in dispute is that Carr moved quickly from school to school: from the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine to the University of Chicago, and that Kammerer followed him to each one. The two of them socialized on occasion. Carr always insisted, and Burroughs believed, that he never had sex with Kammerer; Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally wrote that Kammerer "was a Doppelgänger whose sexual desires Lucien would not gratify; their connection was an intertwined mass of frustration that hinted ominously of trouble."
Carr’s University of Chicago career ended quickly and badly, with an episode that concluded with the young man putting his head into a gas oven. He explained away this act as a “work of art,” but the apparent suicide attempt, which Carr’s family believed was catalyzed by Kammerer, led to a two-week stay in the psychiatric ward at Cook County hospital. Carr’s mother, who had by this time moved to New York City, brought her son there and enrolled him at Columbia University, close to her own home.
If Marian Carr was seeking to protect her son from David Kammerer, she did not succeed. Kammerer soon quit his job and followed Carr to New York, moving into an apartment on Morton street in the West Village.
William Burroughs also moved to New York, to an apartment a block away from Kammerer. The two older men remained friends.
It was also at Columbia that Carr befriended Allen Ginsberg in the Union Theological Seminary dormitory on 122nd street (an overflow residence for Columbia), when Ginsberg knocked on the door to find out who was playing a recording of a Brahms trio.[11] Soon after, a young woman Carr had befriended, Edie Parker, introduced Carr to her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, then twenty-two and nearing the end of his short career as a sailor. Carr, in turn, introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to one another – and both of them to his older friend with more first-hand experience at decadence: William Burroughs. The core of the New York Beat scene had formed, with Carr at the center. As Ginsberg put it, “Lou was the glue.”
Carr, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs explored New York’s grimier underbelly together. Carr had a taste for provocative behavior, for bawdy songs and for coarse antics aimed at shocking those with staid middle-class values. According to Kerouac, Carr once convinced him to get into an empty beer keg, which Carr then rolled down Broadway. Ginsberg wrote in his journal at the time: “Know these words, and you speak the Carr language: fruit, phallus, clitoris, cacoethes, feces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud.” It was Carr who first introduced Ginsberg to the poetry and the story of Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet whose youthful brilliance, decadent style and early death make him a enduring favorite among college students. Rimbaud would be a major influence on Ginsberg’s poetry.
Ginsberg was plainly fascinated by Carr, whom he viewed as a self-destructive egotist but also as a possessor of real genius.[16] Fellow students saw Carr as talented and dissolute, a prank-loving late-night reveler who haunted the dark pockets of Chelsea and Greenwich Village until dawn, without making a dent in his brilliant performance in the classroom. On one occasion, asked why he was carrying a jar of jam across the campus, Carr simply explained that he was “going on a date.” Returning to his dorm in the early hours another morning to find that his bed had been short-sheeted, Carr retaliated by spraying the rooms of his dorm-mates with the hallway fire-hose – while they were still sleeping.
Carr developed what he called the “New Vision,” a thesis recycled from Emersonian transcendentalism and Paris Bohemianism which helped undergird the Beats’ creative rebellion:
“1) Naked self-expression is the seed of creativity. 2) The artist’s consciousness is expanded by derangement of the senses. 3) Art eludes conventional morality.”
For ten months, Kammerer remained a fringe member of this simmering crowd, still utterly infatuated with Carr, who sometimes avoided him and on other occasions indulged Kammerer’s attentions. On one occasion he may even have brought Kammerer to a session of Trilling’s class.Accounts of this period report that Kammerer’s presence and lovelorn devotion to Carr made many of the other Beats uncomfortable. On one occasion, Burroughs found Kammerer trying to hang Kerouac's cat. Kammerer’s psyche was evidently decaying; he was barely scraping by, helping a janitor clean his building on Morton Street in exchange for rent.In July, Carr and Kerouac began talking about shipping out of New York on a Merchant Marine vessel, a scheme which drove Kammerer frantic with anxiety at the possibility of losing Carr. In early August, Kammerer crawled into Carr’s room via the fire escape and watched him sleep for half an hour; he was caught by a guard as he crawled back out again.
Kammerer caught up with Carr at the West End, and the two men went for a walk, ending up in Riverside Park on Manhattan's upper west side.
According to Carr’s version of the night, he and Kammerer were resting near 115th street when Kammerer made yet another sexual advance. When Carr rejected it, he said, Kammerer assaulted him physically, and being larger, gained the upper hand. In desperation and panic, Carr said, he stabbed the older man, using a Boy Scout knife from his St. Louis childhood. Carr then tied his assailant’s hands and feet, wrapped Kemmerer’s belt around his arms, weighted the body with rocks, and dumped it in the nearby Hudson River.
Next, Carr went to the apartment of William Burroughs, gave him Kammerer’s bloodied pack of cigarettes, and explained the incident. Burroughs flushed the cigarettes down the toilet, and told Carr to get a lawyer and turn himself in. Instead Carr sought out Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the knife and some of Kammerer's belongings before the two went to a movie and the Museum of Modern Art to look at paintings. Finally, Carr went to his mother’s house and then to the office of the New York District Attorney, where he confessed. The prosecutors, uncertain whether the story was true – or whether a crime had even been committed – kept him in custody until they had recovered Kammerer's body. Carr identified the corpse, and then led police to where he had thrown Kammerer's eyeglasses in Morningside Park.
Kerouac (who was identified in the New York Times coverage of the crime as a "23-year-old seaman") was arrested as a material witness, as was Burroughs. Burroughs’ father posted bail, but in a famous Beat side-story, Kerouac’s father refused to post the hundred-dollar bond to bail him out. In the end, Edie Parker’s parents agreed to post the money if Kerouac would marry their daughter. With detectives serving as witnesses, Edie and Jack were married at the Municipal Building (where New York City couples still get married by the dozens every day),[30] and after his release, he moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Parker’s hometown. Their marriage was annulled within a year.
Carr was charged with second-degree murder. The story was closely followed in the press, involving as it did a well-liked, gifted student from a prominent family, New York’s premier university, and the scandalous whiff of homosexuality.[31] The newspaper coverage embraced Carr’s story of an obsessed homosexual preying on an appealing heterosexual younger man, who finally lashed out in self-defense.[32] The Daily News called the killing an "honor slaying."[33] If there were subtler shadings to the tale of Carr’s five-year saga with Kammerer, the newspapers ignored them.[34] Carr pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter, and his mother testified at a sentencing hearing about Kammerer’s predatory habits. Carr was sentenced to a term of one-to-twenty years in prison; he served two years in the Elmira Correctional Facility in Upstate New York and was released.[35]
Carr’s Beat crowd (which Ginsberg called “the Libertine Circle”) was, for a time, shattered by the killing. Several members sought to write about the events. Kerouac's The Town and the City is a fictional retelling, in which Carr is represented by the character "Kenneth Wood"; a more literal depiction of events appears in Kerouac’s later Vanity of Duluoz. Soon after the killing, Allen Ginsberg began a novel about the crime which he called “The Bloodsong,” but his English instructor at Columbia, seeking to preclude more negative publicity for Carr or the university, convinced Ginsberg to abandon it.[36] According to author Bill Morgan in his book, The Beat Generation in New York, the Carr incident also inspired Kerouac and Burroughs to collaborate in 1945 on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which wase published for the first time in November 2008.[37]
Settling Down
After his prison term, Carr went to work for United Press International, where he was hired as a copy boy in 1946. He remained on good terms with his Beat friends, and served as best man when Kerouac impetuously married Joan Haverty in November of 1950.[38] Carr has sometimes been credited with providing Kerouac with a roll of teletype paper “pilfered” from the UPI offices, on which Kerouac then wrote the entire first draft of On the Road in a 20-day marathon fueled by coffee, speed, and marijuana. The scroll was real, but Carr’s share of this first draft tale is probably a conflation of two different episodes; the 119-foot first roll, which Kerouac wrote in April 1951, was actually many different large sheets of paper trimmed down and taped together. After Kerouac finished that first version, he moved briefly into Carr's apartment on 21st street, where he wrote a second draft in May on a roll of UPI teletype, and then transferred that work to individual pages for his publisher.[40]
Carr remained a diligent and devoted employee of UPI. In 1956, when Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Kerouac’s On The Road were about to be national sensations, Carr quietly was promoted to night news editor.
Leaving behind his youthful exhibitionism, Carr came to cherish his privacy. In one well-noted gesture, Carr asked Ginsberg to remove his name from the dedication at the start of “Howl.” The poet agreed. Carr even became a voice of caution in Ginsberg’s life, warning him to “keep the hustlers and parasites at arm’s length.”[41] For many years, Ginsberg would visit the UPI offices and press Carr to cover the various causes with which Ginsberg had allied himself.[42] Carr continued to serve Kerouac as a drinking buddy, a reader and critic, reviewing early drafts of Kerouac's work and absorbing Kerouac's growing frustrations with the publishing world.
Carr married Francesca van Hartz and the couple had three children: Simon, Caleb and Ethan (in 1994, Caleb published The Alienist, a novel which became a best-seller and made the son the acclaimed author his father once meant to be).
“When I met him in the mid-50s,” wrote jazz musician David Amram, Carr “was so sophisticated and worldly and fun to be with that even while you always felt at home with him, you knew he was always one step ahead and expected you to follow.” According to Amram, Carr remained loyal to Kerouac to the end of the older man’s life, even as Kerouac descended into alienation and alcoholism.[43]
Lucien Carr spent 47 years, his entire professional career, with UPI, and went on to head the general news desk until his retirement in 1993. If he was famous as a young man for his flamboyant style and outrageous vocabulary, he perfected an opposite style as an editor, and nurtured the skills of brevity in the generations of young journalists whom he mentored. He was known for his oft-repeated suggestion, “Why don’t you just start with the second paragraph?” [44] One reporter quoted Carr as having two acceptable standards for a good lead: "Make me cry or make me horny."
Carr died at George Washington University Hospital in January 2005 after a long battle with bone cancer.
Lucien Carr, one of the founders -- and one of the last survivors -- of the Beat Generation of poets and writers, although one who never wrote poetry or novels, died on Friday. He was 79.
Mr. Carr died at George Washington University Hospital after collapsing at his home in Washington, said his son, the writer Caleb Carr. He had suffered from bone cancer in recent years.
A literary lion who never roared, Mr. Carr served as an inspirational muse to a bunch of college chums at Columbia University in the 1940's: the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelists William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, writers who a decade later changed the course of American letters in coffeehouses in San Francisco and New York.
It was Mr. Carr, for example, who introduced Ginsberg to the works of Rimbaud, a major influence on Ginsberg's work, and then introduced Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg. He introduced them all to Neal Cassady, a railway worker with literary ambitions who became part of the Columbia undergraduates' coterie of ''angel-headed hipsters.'' Together they formed the nucleus of what became the Beats.
Any practical assistance Mr. Carr gave to the Beat movement came as an encouraging editor, the profession he pursued for nearly half a century at United Press and United Press International. It was Mr. Carr, for example, who gave Kerouac the roll of teletype paper, pilfered from U.P., on which the author wrote ''On the Road,'' and it was Mr. Carr who was among the first to read the novel and offer advice, which may or may not have been taken. As Ginsberg once said, ''Lou was the glue.''
Chroniclers of the era and biographers of its writers have always had as much trouble placing Mr. Carr in the group snapshot of the Beats as they have had in defining the movement. Both defied description. The one episode all seize upon came while Mr. Carr was still at Columbia. In repulsing the homosexual advances of a hanger-on of the Beat crowd, Mr. Carr stabbed his pursuer with a Boy Scout knife and killed him. Mr. Carr served a brief time in prison for manslaughter, but was later pardoned.
Born in New York but raised in St. Louis, Mr. Carr had boyish good looks that were only enhanced by a slouchy physique and sardonic grin hidden under a riverboat gambler mustache. A motorcycle enthusiast, who took up boating on his retirement, Mr. Carr was a great jazz aficionado and an avid reader for whom the greatest joys in life were in simple things like a long riff on a tenor sax or a well-turned dependent clause.
Shortly after leaving Columbia, Mr. Carr, to the consternation of his fellow Beats, took a job with United Press in New York and spent the rest of his career, until his retirement in 1993, with the wire service, mostly as the news editor supervising the agency's report for morning newspapers. He remained in contact with the Beats, although Kerouac and Cassady died young. Ginsberg remained a close friend until his death in 1997 and often visited Mr. Carr at U.P.I.'s newsroom to lobby for coverage of whatever political cause he was pursuing at the moment.
If he had been more of a midwife to the Beats, Mr. Carr was an extremely vocal mentor to two generations of journalists who came up through the ranks at U.P.I. He was a great champion of brevity. ''Why don't you just start with the second paragraph?'' was his frequent advice to young reporters overly fond of their own prose.
He guided U.P.I.'s coverage of the major stories of the second half of the 20th century from the cold war and the Kennedy assassination to Vietnam and the moon landing.
He was married twice, first to the former Francesca von Hartz, with whom he had three sons: Simon, of New York City; Caleb, of Cherry Plain, N.Y.; and Ethan, of Amherst, Mass. His second wife was the former Sheila Johnson. He is survived by all of them as well as by Kathleen Silvassy, his companion for the last several years of his life.
source :
Early Life
Carr was born in New York City; his parents, Russell Carr and Marian Gratz Carr, were both products of socially prominent St. Louis families. After his parents separated in 1930, young Lucien and his mother moved back to St. Louis; Carr spent the rest of his childhood there.[1]At the age of 14, Carr met David Kammerer, a man who would have a profound influence on the course of his life. Kammerer was a teacher of English and a physical education instructor at Washington University in St. Louis. Kammerer was a childhood friend of William S. Burroughs, another scion of St. Louis wealth who knew the Carr family. Burroughs and Kammerer had gone to primary school together, and as young men, they traveled together and explored Paris’s night life: Burroughs said Kammerer “was always very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without any middle-class morality.” Kammerer met Carr when he was leading a youth group of which Carr was a member, and quickly became infatuated with the teenager.
Over the next five years, Kammerer pursued Carr, showing up wherever the young man was enrolled at school. Carr would later insist, as would his friends and family, that Kammerer had been hounding Carr sexually with a predatory persistence that would today be considered stalking. Whether Kammerer’s attentions were frightening or flattering to the younger man (or both) is now a matter of some debate among those who chronicle the history of the Beat Generation. What is not in dispute is that Carr moved quickly from school to school: from the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine to the University of Chicago, and that Kammerer followed him to each one. The two of them socialized on occasion. Carr always insisted, and Burroughs believed, that he never had sex with Kammerer; Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally wrote that Kammerer "was a Doppelgänger whose sexual desires Lucien would not gratify; their connection was an intertwined mass of frustration that hinted ominously of trouble."
Carr’s University of Chicago career ended quickly and badly, with an episode that concluded with the young man putting his head into a gas oven. He explained away this act as a “work of art,” but the apparent suicide attempt, which Carr’s family believed was catalyzed by Kammerer, led to a two-week stay in the psychiatric ward at Cook County hospital. Carr’s mother, who had by this time moved to New York City, brought her son there and enrolled him at Columbia University, close to her own home.
If Marian Carr was seeking to protect her son from David Kammerer, she did not succeed. Kammerer soon quit his job and followed Carr to New York, moving into an apartment on Morton street in the West Village.
William Burroughs also moved to New York, to an apartment a block away from Kammerer. The two older men remained friends.
Columbia and the Beats
As a freshman at Columbia, Carr was recognized as an exceptional student with a quick, roving mind. A fellow student from Lionel Trilling’s humanities class described him as “stunningly brilliant…. It seemed as if he and Trilling were having a private conversation.”It was also at Columbia that Carr befriended Allen Ginsberg in the Union Theological Seminary dormitory on 122nd street (an overflow residence for Columbia), when Ginsberg knocked on the door to find out who was playing a recording of a Brahms trio.[11] Soon after, a young woman Carr had befriended, Edie Parker, introduced Carr to her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, then twenty-two and nearing the end of his short career as a sailor. Carr, in turn, introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to one another – and both of them to his older friend with more first-hand experience at decadence: William Burroughs. The core of the New York Beat scene had formed, with Carr at the center. As Ginsberg put it, “Lou was the glue.”
Carr, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs explored New York’s grimier underbelly together. Carr had a taste for provocative behavior, for bawdy songs and for coarse antics aimed at shocking those with staid middle-class values. According to Kerouac, Carr once convinced him to get into an empty beer keg, which Carr then rolled down Broadway. Ginsberg wrote in his journal at the time: “Know these words, and you speak the Carr language: fruit, phallus, clitoris, cacoethes, feces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud.” It was Carr who first introduced Ginsberg to the poetry and the story of Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet whose youthful brilliance, decadent style and early death make him a enduring favorite among college students. Rimbaud would be a major influence on Ginsberg’s poetry.
Ginsberg was plainly fascinated by Carr, whom he viewed as a self-destructive egotist but also as a possessor of real genius.[16] Fellow students saw Carr as talented and dissolute, a prank-loving late-night reveler who haunted the dark pockets of Chelsea and Greenwich Village until dawn, without making a dent in his brilliant performance in the classroom. On one occasion, asked why he was carrying a jar of jam across the campus, Carr simply explained that he was “going on a date.” Returning to his dorm in the early hours another morning to find that his bed had been short-sheeted, Carr retaliated by spraying the rooms of his dorm-mates with the hallway fire-hose – while they were still sleeping.
Carr developed what he called the “New Vision,” a thesis recycled from Emersonian transcendentalism and Paris Bohemianism which helped undergird the Beats’ creative rebellion:
“1) Naked self-expression is the seed of creativity. 2) The artist’s consciousness is expanded by derangement of the senses. 3) Art eludes conventional morality.”
For ten months, Kammerer remained a fringe member of this simmering crowd, still utterly infatuated with Carr, who sometimes avoided him and on other occasions indulged Kammerer’s attentions. On one occasion he may even have brought Kammerer to a session of Trilling’s class.Accounts of this period report that Kammerer’s presence and lovelorn devotion to Carr made many of the other Beats uncomfortable. On one occasion, Burroughs found Kammerer trying to hang Kerouac's cat. Kammerer’s psyche was evidently decaying; he was barely scraping by, helping a janitor clean his building on Morton Street in exchange for rent.In July, Carr and Kerouac began talking about shipping out of New York on a Merchant Marine vessel, a scheme which drove Kammerer frantic with anxiety at the possibility of losing Carr. In early August, Kammerer crawled into Carr’s room via the fire escape and watched him sleep for half an hour; he was caught by a guard as he crawled back out again.
Killing in Riverside Park
On August 13, 1944, Carr and Kerouac attempted, and failed, to ship out of New York to France on a merchant ship - aiming to fulfill a fantasy of walking across France in character as a Frenchman (Kerouac) and his deaf-mute friend (Carr), and hoping to be in Paris in time for the Allied liberation. Kicked off the ship by the first mate at the last minute, the two men drank together at the Beats’ regular bar, the West End. Kerouac left first, and bumped into Kammerer, who asked where Carr was. Kerouac told him.Kammerer caught up with Carr at the West End, and the two men went for a walk, ending up in Riverside Park on Manhattan's upper west side.
According to Carr’s version of the night, he and Kammerer were resting near 115th street when Kammerer made yet another sexual advance. When Carr rejected it, he said, Kammerer assaulted him physically, and being larger, gained the upper hand. In desperation and panic, Carr said, he stabbed the older man, using a Boy Scout knife from his St. Louis childhood. Carr then tied his assailant’s hands and feet, wrapped Kemmerer’s belt around his arms, weighted the body with rocks, and dumped it in the nearby Hudson River.
Next, Carr went to the apartment of William Burroughs, gave him Kammerer’s bloodied pack of cigarettes, and explained the incident. Burroughs flushed the cigarettes down the toilet, and told Carr to get a lawyer and turn himself in. Instead Carr sought out Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the knife and some of Kammerer's belongings before the two went to a movie and the Museum of Modern Art to look at paintings. Finally, Carr went to his mother’s house and then to the office of the New York District Attorney, where he confessed. The prosecutors, uncertain whether the story was true – or whether a crime had even been committed – kept him in custody until they had recovered Kammerer's body. Carr identified the corpse, and then led police to where he had thrown Kammerer's eyeglasses in Morningside Park.
Kerouac (who was identified in the New York Times coverage of the crime as a "23-year-old seaman") was arrested as a material witness, as was Burroughs. Burroughs’ father posted bail, but in a famous Beat side-story, Kerouac’s father refused to post the hundred-dollar bond to bail him out. In the end, Edie Parker’s parents agreed to post the money if Kerouac would marry their daughter. With detectives serving as witnesses, Edie and Jack were married at the Municipal Building (where New York City couples still get married by the dozens every day),[30] and after his release, he moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Parker’s hometown. Their marriage was annulled within a year.
Carr was charged with second-degree murder. The story was closely followed in the press, involving as it did a well-liked, gifted student from a prominent family, New York’s premier university, and the scandalous whiff of homosexuality.[31] The newspaper coverage embraced Carr’s story of an obsessed homosexual preying on an appealing heterosexual younger man, who finally lashed out in self-defense.[32] The Daily News called the killing an "honor slaying."[33] If there were subtler shadings to the tale of Carr’s five-year saga with Kammerer, the newspapers ignored them.[34] Carr pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter, and his mother testified at a sentencing hearing about Kammerer’s predatory habits. Carr was sentenced to a term of one-to-twenty years in prison; he served two years in the Elmira Correctional Facility in Upstate New York and was released.[35]
Carr’s Beat crowd (which Ginsberg called “the Libertine Circle”) was, for a time, shattered by the killing. Several members sought to write about the events. Kerouac's The Town and the City is a fictional retelling, in which Carr is represented by the character "Kenneth Wood"; a more literal depiction of events appears in Kerouac’s later Vanity of Duluoz. Soon after the killing, Allen Ginsberg began a novel about the crime which he called “The Bloodsong,” but his English instructor at Columbia, seeking to preclude more negative publicity for Carr or the university, convinced Ginsberg to abandon it.[36] According to author Bill Morgan in his book, The Beat Generation in New York, the Carr incident also inspired Kerouac and Burroughs to collaborate in 1945 on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which wase published for the first time in November 2008.[37]
Settling Down
After his prison term, Carr went to work for United Press International, where he was hired as a copy boy in 1946. He remained on good terms with his Beat friends, and served as best man when Kerouac impetuously married Joan Haverty in November of 1950.[38] Carr has sometimes been credited with providing Kerouac with a roll of teletype paper “pilfered” from the UPI offices, on which Kerouac then wrote the entire first draft of On the Road in a 20-day marathon fueled by coffee, speed, and marijuana. The scroll was real, but Carr’s share of this first draft tale is probably a conflation of two different episodes; the 119-foot first roll, which Kerouac wrote in April 1951, was actually many different large sheets of paper trimmed down and taped together. After Kerouac finished that first version, he moved briefly into Carr's apartment on 21st street, where he wrote a second draft in May on a roll of UPI teletype, and then transferred that work to individual pages for his publisher.[40]
Carr remained a diligent and devoted employee of UPI. In 1956, when Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Kerouac’s On The Road were about to be national sensations, Carr quietly was promoted to night news editor.
Leaving behind his youthful exhibitionism, Carr came to cherish his privacy. In one well-noted gesture, Carr asked Ginsberg to remove his name from the dedication at the start of “Howl.” The poet agreed. Carr even became a voice of caution in Ginsberg’s life, warning him to “keep the hustlers and parasites at arm’s length.”[41] For many years, Ginsberg would visit the UPI offices and press Carr to cover the various causes with which Ginsberg had allied himself.[42] Carr continued to serve Kerouac as a drinking buddy, a reader and critic, reviewing early drafts of Kerouac's work and absorbing Kerouac's growing frustrations with the publishing world.
Carr married Francesca van Hartz and the couple had three children: Simon, Caleb and Ethan (in 1994, Caleb published The Alienist, a novel which became a best-seller and made the son the acclaimed author his father once meant to be).
“When I met him in the mid-50s,” wrote jazz musician David Amram, Carr “was so sophisticated and worldly and fun to be with that even while you always felt at home with him, you knew he was always one step ahead and expected you to follow.” According to Amram, Carr remained loyal to Kerouac to the end of the older man’s life, even as Kerouac descended into alienation and alcoholism.[43]
Lucien Carr spent 47 years, his entire professional career, with UPI, and went on to head the general news desk until his retirement in 1993. If he was famous as a young man for his flamboyant style and outrageous vocabulary, he perfected an opposite style as an editor, and nurtured the skills of brevity in the generations of young journalists whom he mentored. He was known for his oft-repeated suggestion, “Why don’t you just start with the second paragraph?” [44] One reporter quoted Carr as having two acceptable standards for a good lead: "Make me cry or make me horny."
Carr died at George Washington University Hospital in January 2005 after a long battle with bone cancer.
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