And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008) written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs was actually written in 1945 before the authors even became famous as Beat Generation writers.
The novel is a dramatization of the events in 1944 when Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer twice in the heart with his boy scout knife. The murder is fictionalized and all the characters are given aliases, but at its core that’s what this somewhat peculiarly named novel is about.
The narrative voices alternate chapter by chapter between Will Dennison (Burroughs) and Mike Ryko (Kerouac). The style is mostly descriptive, and it keeps a certain distance to the persons and events in a classic hard-boiled tradition. It is interesting to see that the oddities in both authors individual styles are not all the way developed yet, but the embryos are there.
The two voices dovetail nicely, which means they also describe each other and give variations on the same events from two distinctly different perspectives. Other than that there’s plenty of the Beat Generation staples, drugs and alcohol and promiscuity (sometimes with a twist) and literature, talk of literature, art and philosophy. There’s also the distinct feeling that these young bucks were travelling in packs, moving in a little society their own. Money is always tight and nobody seems to have any kind of stable income.
The complicated relationship between Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen is given a lot of play. Tourian (Carr’s alter ego) is described by Dennison like this:
“This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, ‘O raven-haired Grecian lad…’“(p. 3) whereas Allen “is an impressive-looking gray-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-the-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody.” (p.3).
The thing is that Tourian is still a young man in his later teens when this takes place, and Allen was his teacher at some point. There’s a weird echo of Rimbaud and Verlaine about them, literary pursuits aside. Tourian is aware of Allen’s attraction and in this narrative he doesn’t return any of Allen’s affections, though in real life they probably had a slightly less PG 13 interaction. Tourian plans on leaving the city and Allen’s increasingly stifling attentions by taking hire on a ship headed for France along with Mike Ryko, who has worked on a ship before.
If you know a little about the Beat Generation you will have come across this story before. It influenced everyone connected to it. Burroughs is rumoured to have drifted into morphine addiction because of it, and Lucien Carr himself did his time (two years for first-degree manslaughter) and then went on to have a successful career as an editor for UPI. Carr was also instrumental in introducing Allen Ginsberg to Burroughs and Kammerer, so he was a force at the nexus of the Beats.
This novel, apart from being an interesting read with a lot of sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, or poetry as the case might be, is also one of those hard-boiled murder stories that get undermined by the fact that there is some kind of reality at the base of it. The bohemian lifestyle of the protagonists in World War II New York is depicted with a surprising lack of sentimentality.
It took sixty years between the writing and the publishing of this novel and that means that in the meanwhile the Beats became famous, infamous and some even posthumous. The modern reader comes to this story knowing them and knowing about their literary production. That adds another layer to this, creating a kind of liquid modernity drop-off point where you can’t help asking what is real in any of this. At the end of the day we have Carr’s description of what happened, the way it was presented at court and then the literary variations of the same event. It’s fascinating for more reasons than just the sensationalism of the murder itself or as a curio involving two writers who were on the verge of becoming seminal voices of their generation.

Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient – Deserts

The English Patient (1992) is probably the best known of Ondaatje’s novels, largely due to Anthony Mingella’s movie of the same title made in -96. There are always varying opinions about books made into film, ususally on the theme “the book is not like the film, is not enough like the film, is too much like the film” and I personally think this has to do with the idea that the movie and the book can be the same thing, which is of course physically impossible. Not only is the movie a collective effort, it is also a completely different medium – seems obvious when you set it in writing, doesn’t it? So why do people argue the point?

I believe it is because we hold the filmmaker up to our own imaginings and try to see how well they’ve managed to translate the cinematography of the thearte of our minds onto the big screen.  But I digress.

The English Patient is one of those novels that offer a variety of different interpretations depending on what you focus on. You can say that about most novels, true, but normally you have to work harder for it. In this case the question of identity comes to the fore right from the first page. Identity and nationality.

The patient, count Almásy, is actually Hungarian by birth but has during his work in the desert come to the conclusion that nationality does not really matter in the select company of desert explorers he keeps before the war. He falls in love with Catherine Clifton, the wife of Geoffrey Clifton, both of them British. Almásy finally winds up in an Italian villa with a Canadian thief by the name of Caravaggio, a nurse named Hana, also Canadian, and a Sikh sapper working for the British by the name of Kip (or actually – Kirpahl Singh).

The action travels from Cairo to Italy via the Desert and mentions the places alive in peoples memories, such as English gardens and the Canadian lakes. Kip talks of India, and late in the action mentions Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming the wise old fathers would not have done such a thing to the brown races of the world. Activate Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism here if you like.

Another aspect is the interpersonal relationships and all their inherent politics. Almáshy and Catherine have an extra marital affair that has devastating consequences, and not only for them personally. In the end it results in Almáshy helping Rommel across the desert. When Clifton tries for a murder/suicide to punish his wife and Almáshy for their betrayal Catherine is hurt badly and when Almáshy tries to go for help he is rejected by the British who regard any foreign national as a threat at this time. Almáshy gets help from the Germans instead on the condition that he guides them through the desert. Catherine is waiting for him in the Gelf Kebir, but she is long dead by the time he gets there. It is when he tries to fly out of the desert in an old plane that has laid buried in the sand for a long time that he catches fire and falls burning from the sky. Rescued and kept alive by a desert tribe he is finally brought in to hospital, claiming to no longer know his name. He becomes The English Patient, and the irony is not lost on him.

The other crucial realtionship in this novel is that between Hana and Kip – the Canadian nurse caring for Almáshy and the Indian Sikh solider trying to clear the area in Italy where the Villa San Girolamo is situated of mines. Hana falls in love with the Sikh and seems fascinated in part with his otherness, the colour of his skin, the sing-song of his dialect, his long dark hair and so on. Hana has been a nurse all through the war and is described as having suffered shell-shock, not so much from the action as from the death of her father. She and Kip negotiate a complicated territory between them. She is scarred by the war and her own personal tragedies, Kip seems to distance himself from personal realtionships from the sheer need of distance. He is a sapper, after all. Death is just a step away for him at all times.

If you go at this book as a parable of love and indentity there are many interesting observations to make. Relationships are messy at best and fail, but for very different reasons. The landscape Almáshy has chosen to live in is the desert. His deep fascination with it seems to rub off on his charater. Catherine misses her green English gardens and never seems at home in the harsh dryness. Kip brings with him the fecundity of India and Hana speaks of the snow and lakes of Canada. It is more than just description of where the characters were born. It speaks instead of everyhting they are, to themselves and others.

On the level of language Ondaatje never disappoints. He delivers one magical image after another, replete with a deep afterthought on what these images will conjure up. One of my favourites is the description of the sand dunes as the corrugated surface of the roof of a dog’s mouth. And the idea that the desert explorer who is reported to have written this sentence was liked by his peers for having the kind of inquisitive curiosity that would stick his hand in the maw of a dog. Double and tripple meanings to everything. Beautiful, caustic at times, opulent at times.

Caravaggio, who has worked as a spy for the allies during the war has been caught and tortured by Nazi soliders who cut off his thumbs. He has since then been addicted to morphine and at one point he is described as wearing the false limbs that morphia promises. A beautiful summation of how damaged he is, and how addicted and scarred.

Ondaatje has done his homework and managed to write intelligently about WWII without falling into the typical genre traps and clichées. He takes hold of his subject and pours everything into it until the text is so rich and layered you can read and re-read his novel and still find more substance to it. The way he treats stories and timelines and subject matter always offers more than any paltry review can do justice to. This is not just another period piece love story. It has far more to offer.

MULE