David Carr Recommended Writers Read Up in the Old Hotel

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American announcer

Lucien Carr
Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr (correct) in 1944
Born	(1925-03-01)March 1, 1925 New York City
Died	Jan 28, 2005(2005-01-28) (aged 79) Washington, D.C.
Education	Phillips Academy Bowdoin College University of Chicago Columbia University
Spouse(south)	Francesca van Hartz (g. 1952; div. 1963) Sheila Johnson
Children	3, including Caleb Carr

Lucien Carr (March one, 1925 – January 28, 2005) was a fundamental fellow member of the original New York Metropolis circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s; later he worked for many years as an editor for United Press International.

Early on life [edit]

Carr was born in New York Urban center; his parents, Marion Howland (née Gratz) and Russell Carr, were both offspring of socially prominent St. Louis families. After his parents separated in 1930, immature Lucien and his mother moved dorsum to St. Louis; Carr spent the rest of his childhood there.^[1]

At the age of 12, Carr met David Kammerer (b. 1911), a man who would accept a profound influence on the grade of his life. Kammerer was a teacher of English and a physical educational activity instructor at Washington University in St. Louis. Kammerer was a childhood friend of William S. Burroughs, some other scion of St. Louis wealth who knew the Carr family unit. Burroughs and Kammerer had gone to main school together, and every bit immature men they traveled together and explored Paris's nightlife: Burroughs said Kammerer "was ever very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without whatsoever eye-course morality."^[ii] Kammerer met Carr when he was leading a Male child Scout Troop^[3] of which Carr was a fellow 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 after insist, as would his friends and family, that Kammerer had been hounding Carr sexually with a predatory persistence that would today exist considered stalking.^[4] Whether Kammerer's attentions were frightening or flattering to Carr (or both) is now a affair of some debate amongst those who relate the history of the Beat Generation.^[5] What is not in dispute is that Carr moved quickly from school to school: from the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, to Bowdoin Higher in Brunswick, Maine, to the Academy of Chicago, and that Kammerer followed him to each 1.^[six] The two of them socialized on occasion. Carr e'er insisted, and Burroughs believed, that he never had sex with Kammerer; Jack 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."^[7]

Carr's Academy of Chicago career ended quickly and desperately, with an episode that concluded with the young man putting his head into a gas oven. He explained away this human activity as a "piece of work of art,"^[eight] but the credible suicide attempt, which Carr'southward family unit believed was catalyzed by Kammerer, led to a two-week stay in the psychiatric ward at Cook Canton infirmary.^[9] 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.^{[ citation needed ]}

If Marion Carr was seeking to protect her son from David Kammerer, she did not succeed. Kammerer soon quit his task and followed Carr to New York, moving into an apartment on Morton Street in the West Village.^[10] William Burroughs as well moved to New York, to an apartment a block away from Kammerer. The ii older men remained friends.^{[ citation needed ]}

Columbia and the Beats [edit]

Every bit a freshman at Columbia, Carr was recognized every bit an infrequent student with a quick, roving mind. A fellow student from Lionel Trilling's humanities grade described him as "stunningly brilliant. ... It seemed as if he and Trilling were having a private chat."^[xi] He joined the campus literary and debate grouping, the Philolexian Society.^[12]

Information technology was also at Columbia that Carr befriended Allen Ginsberg in the Union Theological Seminary dormitory on West 122nd Street (an overflow residence for Columbia at the fourth dimension), when Ginsberg knocked on the door to find out who was playing a recording of a Brahms trio.^[8] Soon later, a young woman Carr had befriended, Edie Parker, introduced Carr to her fellow, Jack Kerouac, and so twenty-ii and nearing the terminate of his short career as a crewman. Carr, in turn, introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to one another^[13] – and both of them to his older friend with more first-hand experience at decadence: William Burroughs. The core of the New York Beat out scene had formed, with Carr at the middle. As Ginsberg put it, "Lou was the glue."^[xiv]

Carr, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs explored New York's grimier underbelly together. It was at this fourth dimension that they fell in with Herbert Huncke, an underworld character and after writer and poet. 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 one time 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, carrion, foetus, womb, Rimbaud."^[8] Information technology was Carr who first introduced Ginsberg to the verse and the story of 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud would be a major influence on Ginsberg'south poesy.^[fourteen]

Ginsberg was apparently fascinated past Carr, whom he viewed as a cocky-destructive egotist simply also every bit a possessor of real genius.^[15] Fellow students saw Carr every bit talented and dissolute, a prank-loving late-dark 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 i occasion, asked why he was conveying a jar of jam across the campus, Carr simply explained that he was "going on a engagement." Returning to his dorm in the early hours another morn to observe 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 all the same sleeping.^[16]

Carr adult what he chosen the "New Vision," a thesis recycled from Emersonian transcendentalism and Paris Bohemianism^[17] which helped undergird the Beats' artistic rebellion:

Naked cocky-expression is the seed of creativity.
The artist's consciousness is expanded by derangement of the senses.
Art eludes conventional morality.^[xviii]

For ten months, Kammerer remained a fringe fellow member of this simmering oversupply, even so utterly infatuated with Carr, who sometimes avoided him and on other occasions indulged Kammerer'southward attentions. On one occasion he may even accept brought Kammerer to a session of Trilling's grade.^[16] Accounts of this catamenia written report that Kammerer's presence and lovelorn devotion to Carr made many of the other Beats uncomfortable.^[xix] On one occasion, Burroughs plant Kammerer trying to hang Kerouac's cat.^[twenty] Kammerer's psyche was plain decaying; he was barely scraping by, helping a janitor make clean his building on Morton Street in exchange for rent.^[21] In July 1944, 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 on Baronial, Kammerer crawled into Carr'south room via the fire escape and watched him sleep for half an hr; he was defenseless by a guard as he crawled back out again.^[22]

Killing in Riverside Park [edit]

On August 13, 1944, Carr and Kerouac attempted to ship out of New York to France on a merchant ship. They were aiming to fulfill a fantasy of walking beyond France in the character as a Frenchman (Kerouac) and his deaf-mute friend (Carr) and hoped to exist in Paris in time for the liberation by the Allies. Kicked off the send by the first mate at the last minute, the two men drank together at the Beats' regular bar, the West End. Kerouac left kickoff and bumped into Kammerer, who asked where Carr was; Kerouac told him.^[23]

Kammerer caught up with Carr at the West Stop, and the two men went for a walk, ending upwards in Riverside Park on Manhattan'due south Upper Westward Side.^[24]

According to Carr'south version of the night, he and Kammerer were resting near Westward 115th Street when Kammerer made yet another sexual advance. When Carr rejected it, he said that Kammerer assaulted him physically, and gained the upper hand in the struggle due to his larger size. In desperation and panic, Carr said, he stabbed the older man by using a Boy Lookout man knife from his St. Louis childhood. Carr then tied his assailant's hands and anxiety, wrapped Kammerer's belt around his artillery, weighted the body with rocks, and dumped it in the nearby Hudson River.^[21]

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 to turn himself in. Instead, Carr sought out Kerouac, who with the aid of Abe Green (a protégé of Herbert Huncke) helped him dispose of the pocketknife and some of Kammerer'south belongings before the 2 went to a movie (Zoltan Korda's The 4 Feathers) and the Museum of Modernistic Art to look at paintings.^[25] Finally, Carr went to his mother'south house and then to the role of the New York District Chaser, where he confessed. The prosecutors, uncertain whether the story was truthful or whether a crime had fifty-fifty been committed kept him in custody until they had recovered Kammerer's body. Carr identified the corpse and led police to where he had buried Kammerer's eyeglasses in Morningside Park.^[21]

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, equally was Burroughs, whose father posted bond. Yet, Kerouac's male parent refused to post the $100 bond to bond him out. In the cease, Edie Parker'due south parents agreed to post the coin if Kerouac would marry their daughter. With detectives serving equally witnesses, Edie and Jack were married at the Municipal Edifice,^[26] and after his release, he moved to Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, Parker's hometown. Their union was annulled in 1948.^[27]

Carr was charged with 2nd-caste murder. The story was closely followed in the press since information technology involved a well-liked, gifted student from a prominent family, New York's premier university, and the scandalous elements of rape and homosexuality.^[19] 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] The Daily News chosen the killing an "honor slaying", an early example of what was later called the 'gay panic defense.'^[28] If there were subtle shadings to the tale of Carr's five-year saga with Kammerer, the newspapers ignored them.^[29] Carr pleaded guilty to outset-degree manslaughter, and his mother testified at a sentencing hearing about Kammerer'southward predatory habits. Carr was sentenced to a term of one to twenty years in prison. He served ii years in the Elmira Correctional Facility in Upstate New York and was released.^[19]

Carr's Beat crowd (which Ginsberg called "the Libertine Circle") was, for a fourth dimension, 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'southward subsequently Vanity of Duluoz. Soon after the killing, Allen Ginsberg began a novel almost the offense, which he called The Bloodsong, but his English teacher at Columbia, seeking to preclude more negative publicity for Carr or the university, persuaded Ginsberg to abandon it.^[nineteen] According to the author Neb Morgan in his volume, 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.^[30]

The 2013 film Kill Your Darlings is a fictionalized business relationship of the killing in Riverside Park that tells a version of the murder like to the version that is portrayed in And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. In the picture, Kammerer is portrayed every bit deeply in love with Carr to the bespeak of obsession. Carr is portrayed as a young man who is very conflicted by his feelings towards Kammerer and struggles to interruption ties. Their relationship is further complicated by Carr using Kammerer to write his school essays and Kammerer using the essays to stay fastened to Carr.

Dissenting opinions [edit]

In a letter of the alphabet to New York magazine, published on June 7, 1976 and written by Patricia Healy (née Goode), the wife of the Irish author T. F. Healy, she puts forth a strident defence of Kammerer in her rebuttal to an article written by Aaron Latham and previously published in the magazine. She had been a student at Barnard College while the Beat Generation was coalescing in the 1940s in New York City. She had known several key members of the literary motion, including Burroughs, Kerouac, and Carr merely not Ginsberg at the time.

In her rebuttal, she painted a radically different portrait of Kammerer, with whom she stated that she had been peculiarly close, and his relationship with Carr. Far from Kammerer having been the fringe figure inside the Beat movement of the time as often depicted, she asserted that he had been a guiding light within the literary circle with many taking inspiration from his informal lectures, especially Kerouac, whom she defendant of ingratitude for never acknowledging his debt to Kammerer. She rebutted what she termed "the Lucien myth," that Carr was the victim of Kammerer's relentless obsession and stalking. On the contrary, she stated that it was Kammerer who wanted to be rid of Carr, whom he referred to every bit "that petty bastard." On ane occasion, she wrote, she accompanied Carr to Kammerer's apartment, where Kammerer was hostile toward Carr and insisted that he had told Carr never to come around over again. The resulting altercation culminated with Kammerer assaulting Carr with his fists and knocking him to the flooring. Within her rebuttal letter, Healy hinted that Carr had oft sought Kammerer'southward help in writing his Columbia term papers.

Healy also offers show that Kammerer, far from being the homosexual pedophile as often depicted in later accounts, was very much heterosexual, every bit evidenced by his pursuit of a "kept woman" of his acquaintance.^[31]

In Carr's obituary in The Guardian (February 8, 2005), Eric Homberger questioned Carr'south account of the killing:

Central to Carr's defense was that he was non gay, and that Kammerer, an obsessive stalker, threatened sexual violence. Once the story of a predatory homosexual was presented in court, Carr became a victim and the murder was framed as an honor killing. There was no one in courtroom to question the story or offer a different version of the human relationship.

Much of the story, however, is hundred-to-one; mayhap now, with Carr'south death, information technology may be possible to disentangle the strands of insinuation, legal spin and lies. There is no independent proof that Kammerer was a predatory stalker; there is simply Carr's word for the pursuit from St. Louis to New York. There is persuasive bear witness that Kammerer was non gay. Carr enjoyed his power to manipulate the older man, and got him to write essays for his classes at New York's Columbia University. A friend remembers Kammerer slamming the door of his apartment in Carr'south face, and telling him to get lost.

In that location is much evidence to suggest that Carr had been a troubled and unstable immature man. While at the University of Chicago, he attempted to commit suicide with his head in an unlit gas oven, and told a psychiatrist that information technology had been a functioning, a piece of work of art. In New York, Carr gave Ginsberg, who had been raised respectably in New Jersey, where his male parent was a teacher, a new language of eroticism and danger. Ginsberg carefully wrote in his journal the key terms of the "Carr language": fruit, phallus, clitoris, cacoethes, faeces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud.^[32]

Settling down [edit]

After his prison house term, Carr went to work for United Press (Upwards), which subsequently became United Printing International (UPI), where he was hired every bit a copy boy in 1946. He remained on skilful terms with his Beat friends, and served as best human being when Kerouac impetuously married Joan Haverty in November 1950.^[33] Carr has sometimes been credited with having provided Kerouac with a scroll of teleprinter paper "pilfered" from the Upwards offices, on which Kerouac then wrote the entire beginning draft of On the Road in a 20-day marathon fueled past coffee, speed, and marijuana.^[14] The curlicue was real, but Carr's share of this first draft tale is probably a conflation of two different episodes; the 119-foot showtime coil, which Kerouac wrote in April 1951, was really many different large sheets of paper trimmed downwards and taped together. After Kerouac finished that beginning version, he moved briefly into Carr's apartment on 21st Street, where he wrote a 2nd draft in May on a scroll of United Printing teleprinter, and so transferred that piece of work to individual pages for his publisher.^[34]

Carr remained a diligent and devoted employee of Upward / UPI. In 1956, when Ginsberg'southward "Howl" and Kerouac'south On the Road were nearly to be national sensations, Carr was promoted to dark news editor.^{[ commendation needed ]}

Leaving backside 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 get-go of "Howl." The poet agreed. Carr even became a voice of circumspection in Ginsberg'southward life, warning him to "keep the hustlers and parasites at arm'southward length."^[24] For many years, Ginsberg would visit the UPI offices and printing Carr to cover the various causes with which Ginsberg had allied himself.^[fourteen] Carr continued to serve Kerouac as a drinking buddy, a reader and critic, reviewing early on drafts of Kerouac's work and absorbing Kerouac's growing frustrations with the publishing globe.^{[ citation needed ]}

Carr married Francesca van Hartz in 1952, and the couple had three children: Simon, Caleb, and Ethan (in 1994, Caleb published The Alienist, a novel which became a best-seller.) They divorced and he afterwards married Sheila Johnson.^[32]

"When I met him in the mid-50s," wrote jazz musician David Amram, Carr "was and so sophisticated and worldly and fun to be with that even while you lot always felt at habitation with him, you knew he was e'er one step ahead and expected you to follow." Co-ordinate to Amram, Carr remained loyal to Kerouac to the end of the older man's life, fifty-fifty every bit Kerouac descended into alienation and alcoholism.^[35]

Lucien Carr spent 47 years, his entire professional career, with UPI, and went on to caput the full general news desk-bound until his retirement in 1993. If he was famous equally a swain for his flamboyant fashion and outrageous vocabulary, he perfected an reverse style as an editor, and nurtured the skills of brevity in the generations of immature journalists whom he mentored. He was known for his oftentimes-repeated proposition, "Why don't you but first with the second paragraph?" ^[14] Carr was reputed to have strict adequate standards for a good lead, his mantra being "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em horny" (or variations of this).^[36] ^[37]

Carr died at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. in January 2005 after a long battle with bone cancer.^[38]

References [edit]

^ Lawlor, William, Beat Culture: Lifestyle, Icons and Impact, ABC-CLIO, 2005, p. 167
^ Lawlor, Beat Culture, p. 46
^ Caleb Carr explains this to The Daily Caller, in regards to the truth behind the movie "Kill Your Darlings", 2014, pg. 2
^ Adams, Frank, "Columbia Educatee Kills Friend and Sinks Torso in Hudson River," The New York Times, Baronial 17, 1944
^ For comparison, see the differences in interpretation between William Lawlor in Beat Culture and James Campbell in This is the Vanquish Generation, and compare to Eric Homberger's comments in "Lucien Carr: Fallen Angel of the Beat Poets"
^ Campbell, James, This is the Beat Generation, University of California Press, London, 1999, pp. x–12
^ McNally, Dennis, Desolate Angel, Da Capo Press edition, 2003, p. 67
^ ^a ^b ^c Campbell, This is the Beat Generation, p. 12
^ Lawlor, Beat out Culture, p. 167
^ Campbell, This is the Vanquish Generation, p. 13
^ Aureate, Ed, "Memories of a Shell Who Took A Different Road," Downtown Express, April 1–seven, 2005, Vol. 17, Number 45
^ "Columbia Daily Spectator ane September 1944 — Columbia Spectator". spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu . Retrieved 13 April 2018.
^ Homberger, Eric, "Lucien Carr: fallen affections of the beat poets, later an unflappable news editor with United Press," The Guardian, 9 February 2005
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^east Hampton, Wilborn (30 January 2005). "Lucien Carr, a Founder and a Muse of the Beat Generation, Dies at 79". New York Times . Retrieved 25 May 2017.
^ Campbell, This is the Shell Generation, p. 23
^ ^a ^b Aureate, "Memories of a Beat out Who Took A Different Road"
^ Maher and Amram, Jack Kerouac, p. 117
^ Campbell, This is the Beat out Generation, p. 26
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Lawlor, Crush Culture, p. 168
^ McNally, Desolate Angel, p. 68
^ ^a ^b ^c Adams, "Columbia Student Kills Friend"
^ Charters, Ann. (1973). Kerouac: A biography, pp. 44 and 47. San Francisco, CA: Direct Arrow Press.
^ McNally, Desolate Angel, p. 69
^ ^a ^b ^c Homberger, "Lucien Carr: fallen affections of the trounce poets"
^ Campbell, This is the Beat Generation, pp. 30–31
^ Campbell, This is the Beat Generation, p. 33
^ Knight, Brenda, ed., Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, Conari Press, 1996, p. 78-9.
^ McNally, Desolate Angel, p. 70
^ Campbell, This is the Beat Generation, pp. 34–35
^ "Grove Atlantic - An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917". world wide web.groveatlantic.com . Retrieved xiii Apr 2018.
^ http://www.chezjim.com/Mom/beatniks.html, "ENCOUNTERS: Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg"
^ ^a ^b Homberger, Eric (8 February 2005). "Lucien Carr". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 July 2017.
^ McNally, Desolate Angel, p. 131
^ McNally, Desolate Affections, pp. 134–5
^ from an April 13, 2005 testimonial by Amram to Lucien following Lucien's death, available online at http://www.insomniacathon.org/rrILCTDA01.html
^ In Extremis: The Life of State of war Correspondent Marie Colvin, Lindsey Hilsum, Vintage Books, 2019
^ "The Final Beat".
^ "Newsman Lucien Carr Dies at 79," The Washington Mail, January 29, 2005, p. B5

Sources [edit]

Collins, Ronald & Skover, David, Mania: The Story of the Outraged & Outrageous Lives that Launched a Cultural Revolution (Height-Five Books, March 2013)