The Lucien Carr Centennial

Born 100 years ago today, the man who brought the Beats together Lucien Carr (1925-2005). (Confusingly, this important figure has nothing to do with either Lucien Truscott IV or C. Carr, whose bylines I used to see routinely in New York’s alternative weeklies. You can forgive my mind for grouping them together, can’t you?)

Carr had a reputation for Rabelaisian wit, brilliant scholarship, and a penchant for pranks. He had known William S. Burroughs since his boyhood in St. Louis; he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at Columbia and introduced them all together. While Carr himself is not known as a literary figure, it was Carr who turned Ginsberg on to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. This image of Rimbaud demonstrates that for a time Carr was emulating Rimbaud’s visual style as much as his literary one:

It was Carr who devised what may be regarded as the founding philosophy of what became the Beats, largely cobbled together from the utterances of French poets and the Transcendentalists. Ginsberg dedicated Howl (1956) to Carr, though Carr asked that his name be removed from the published book.

The early years of the Beats were characterized by their shenanigans as much as their literary output. With the older, semi-criminal junkie Herbert Huncke as a kind of instigator they prowled the seedier parts of the city (the waterfronts, the Bowery, Greenwich Village) at night seeking trouble to get into. It all came to a head when Carr murdered one of their larger circle, a man named David Kammerer. Kammerer and Burroughs were boyhood confreres and had even spent time in Paris together. Kammerer had apparently been obsessed with Carr since the St. Louis days, when he was an English teacher and gym coach, and Carr was just a 12 year old boy. The usual narrative is that Kammerer was something like a stalker. In August 1944, Kerouac and Carr hatched a half-serious plan to hitch a ride on a Merchant Marine vessel and make their way to Paris. This supposedly freaked Kammerer out and he attacked Carr one late night in Riverside Park. In self-defense, Carr stabbed Kammerer with a pocket knife and threw his body into the Hudson River. He turned himself in shortly thereafter and served two years in prison. The short sentence had to do with Carr’s social status and the fact that his defense team pioneered what has become known as the “gay panic defense”. In other words (according to the verdict) there was justification in his murdering another man for making a pass at him. Today we’re at a 180 degree remove from that. If you kill a gay man for being gay, that’s a hate crime.

In 1945 Keroauc and Burroughs collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which dealt with the murder, though it was not published in its entirety until 2008. Kerouac’s The Town and the City (1950) and Vanity of Duluoz (1968) also referred to the event. As for Carr, much like his hero Rimbaud, he left his life as a literary Bohemian behind him. After emerging from prison in 1946, he was hired as a copyboy by United Press International. He was an editor at UPI for nearly a half century, retiring in 1993. The following year his son Caleb Carr pubished his terrific pseudo-Victorian novel The Alienist. This was followed by the 1997 sequel The Angel of Darkness, and screen adaptations. (Apparently his father’s own violence was the impetus for his interest in the topic). Meanwhile, Lucien’s story was dramatized in the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings.

Lucien Carr died in 2005. Intriguingly, the cause was bone cancer — the same thing that killed Rimbaud. Sadly, Caleb Carr passed away just a few months ago, also of cancer.