Lucien Carr (March 1, 1925 – January 28, 2005) was a key member of the original New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s and also a convicted manslaughterer.
[9] Whether the attentions of a man fourteen years his senior were frightening or flattering to the underage Carr is now a matter of some debate among those who chronicle the history of the Beat Generation.
He explained away this act as a "work of art,"[13] 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.
He soon quit his job and followed Carr to New York, moving into an apartment on Morton Street in the West Village, one block from William Burroughs' residence; the two older men remained friends.
Carr, in turn, introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to one another[18] – and both of them to his older friend with more first-hand experience at decadence: William Burroughs.
Carr had a taste for provocative behavior, for bawdy songs and for coarse antics aimed at shocking those with staid middle-class values.
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.
[20] 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.
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.
[21] Carr developed what he called the "New Vision," a thesis recycled from Emersonian transcendentalism and Parisian Bohemianism[22] which helped undergird the Beats' creative rebellion: 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.
[25] Kammerer's psyche was evidently decaying; he was barely scraping by, helping a janitor clean his building on Morton Street in exchange for rent.
They were aiming to fulfill a fantasy of travelling across France in character as a Frenchman (Kerouac) and his deaf-mute friend (Carr) and hoped to be in Paris in time for the liberation by the Allies.
Carr then tied his assailant's hands and feet, wrapped Kammerer's belt around his arms, weighted the body with rocks, and dumped it in the nearby Hudson River.
Instead, Carr sought out Kerouac, who with the aid of Abe Green (a protégé of Herbert Huncke) helped him dispose of the knife and some of Kammerer's belongings before the two went to a movie (Zoltan Korda's The Four Feathers) and to the Museum of Modern Art to look at paintings.
[26] 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, whose father posted bail.
With detectives serving as witnesses, Edie and Jack were married at the Municipal Building,[31] and after his release, he moved to Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, Parker's hometown.
The story was closely followed in the press since it involved a well-liked, gifted student from a prominent family, New York's premier university, and the scandalous elements of rape and homosexuality.
[24] 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.
[24] According to the 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 was published for the first time in its entirety in November 2008.
Refuting the common depiction of Kammerer as fringe figure within the Beat movement, she characterized him as a guiding light within that literary circle.
While at the University of Chicago, he attempted to commit suicide with his head in an unlit gas oven, and told a psychiatrist that it had been a performance, a work of art.
Ginsberg carefully wrote in his journal the key terms of the "Carr language": fruit, phallus, clitoris, cacoethes, faeces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud.
He remained on good terms with his Beat friends, and served as best man when Kerouac impetuously married Joan Haverty in November 1950.
[19] 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 United Press teleprinter, and then transferred that work to individual pages for his publisher.
[37] "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."
[41] 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.