Posthumous Juvenilia

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a 1945 collaborative effort by the young Jack Kerouac and his friend, the somewhat older William S. Burroughs, to render a fiction of the true-life story of the murder of Dave Kammerer by the boy he was stalking, Lucien Carr, is considered a bad book: 1) it was not published until last year, and so, not having found a publisher early on, when it was first sent out, it must be bad; and 2) it is thought to be a lesser work for these iconic writers, and why publish a bad book by otherwise good writers, especially posthumously and after much lauded careers. Alternating chapters in the hardboiled detective genre, the two authors reveal an interesting moment in early Beat history and the beginnings of their own crafts. Is it ever good to publish a serious writer's post-juvenilia? Perhaps challenged by this material, Kerouac went on to write a new version in the realistic style he was developing even before The Town and the City (1950), his first published novel. That version, a gem called Wish I Were You, remains in fragment, and is the finest example of Kerouac's pre-spontaneous bop prosody. As to Hippos, well, the book provides a glimpse into the lives of young people in postwar New York City, and even if Kerouac/Burroughs's best writing is not fully displayed, still fascinates. In fact, if not exactly good, it's not half bad either.