Murder Somewhat Foul

As a willing victim of both fine, fine institutions, I can say that the University of Chicago is creepier than Columbia—creepier in the sense of both “What is on that guy’s computer?” and the dim, uneasy, heimlich/unheimlich perception of being on the brink of some abyss or other. But hold your head up, Columbia, because after all the U of C has stolen—the Manhattan project, the Core, the self-righteous self-gratification over the Core—we can finally steal something back: the prize for best murder.

In 1924, in one of the first Crime(s) of the Century, U of C students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb misread Nietzsche and murdered (chloroform, chisel) a random boy to prove that they were supermen. It was quite a big deal because a) it was 1924, and b) they were rich, smart, Jewish, and gay.

In addition to two good films (Rope, Swoon), the murder/trial spawned the film Compulsion, which suggests that all this unpleasantness could have been avoided if they had only talked to girls once in a while. There have been no films, however, about the Columbia murder, which is, quite frankly, bullshit, because whatever the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr lacks in malevolence, it more than makes up for in sordidness and famous people.

Carr was 19, rich, straight, and, by all accounts, a hot piece of ass—oh-so-hetero Jack Kerouac describes him as both a “fantastic male beauty” and “a mischievous little prick.” He had already bounced out of Andover, Bowdoin, and, obviously, the University of Chicago, where he tried to kill himself (head in the oven). Apparently none of these were deal breakers for the Columbia College admissions office, so he came to New York, with Kammerer one step behind.

Kammerer was 33 and had been—enjoy this moment, because your mind is about to be made up forever—the leader of Carr’s Boy Scout troop in St. Louis, and he had “followed” Carr to each expensive school. But he had good qualities, too. Allen Ginsberg writes of the “wonderful, perverse Kammerer.” Kerouac notes that he was “not a bad guy in himself.” If nothing else, he introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to his hometown friend, William S. Burroughs.

But the Carr/Kammerer relationship is a little less straightforward than it might seem. Using pseudonyms, Kerouac notes that “it isn’t that [Carr] wants [Kammerer] to follow him, or that he wants to turn him away, it’s just a lot of fun, like [long story about sinking a yacht for fun].” And they had fun at Columbia—pushing Kerouac in a barrel up and down Broadway, for example—for a while.

Kammerer had met Carr five years earlier, when he was 14, in what Kerouac presents as a fairly Lolita-like story, with Carr as the reincarnation of an earlier beautiful boy. And we all know the familiar device in Lolita-like stories—people grow up. It’s impossible to know if Kammerer was actually a pedophile or just tired of waiting, but he apparently grew increasingly desperate as the summer of 1944 wore on, prompting Carr to plan to run away and be poetic with Kerouac in not-yet-liberated France.

So then it is unclear why Carr went willingly with Kammerer and a bottle of wine to Riverside Park, which was (and still is, the proper authorities tell me) a place where gay guys hook up. It’s also unclear what ultimately led Carr to stab him in the heart 12 times with, just for the Greek tragedy of it all, his Boy Scout knife.

After shoving Kammerer into the Hudson and conferring with Burroughs, Carr woke Kerouac at dawn, so that they could dispose of the knife and Kammerer’s glasses, visit Carr’s analyst, catch a movie, stroll around MoMA, and return home, where the cops were waiting.

The New York Times notes that Carr listened “lackadaisically” to the arraignment while clutching A Vision by William Butler “Keats” (as one tabloid had it) and that Kerouac, held as a material witness/accessory after the fact, was “greatly concerned at the high bail set.” Kerouac got out of jail (after identifying Kammerer’s Hudson-bloated corpse) by promising to marry his girlfriend if she bailed him out (annulled a year later). The Carr defense team presented the idea that he was protecting his honor from a predatory homosexual, and he was out in two years.

Sadly, any possible lesson remains elusive, because in 1944 there was no BWOG-like entity to record the diverse brilliant reactions of the Columbia community. Fortunately, though, the Spectator editorial board, apparently with Leopold and Loeb in mind, lost all sense of perspective: “[T]here is a complexity to the background of the case that will defy ordinary police and legal investigations. The search for motive will dig deep into the more hidden areas of the intellectual world. What it will reveal may not be pleasant to the humdrum and ordinary society outside. But that the evidence derived from so strange a case will be immensely important that society will not be able to deny.”

Kerouac’s synopsis is similarly insightful: the “Gospel truth” is that Carr “had been subject to an attempt at degrading by an older man who was a pederast, and that he had dispatched him off to an old lover called the river.”

But what is there to say, really? Lacking any kind of center, discernible moral, or sympathetic character, the story has a way of frustrating its telling. A collaborative novel by Kerouac and Burroughs was never published, and Kerouac was only able to relate the story successfully (and break his promise of silence) by imitating his other endless strings of pointless episodes.

Still, perhaps Ginsberg, who abandoned his own novel when his CC adviser called it “smutty,” has the best narrative sense of all. Kerouac reports that Carr kept repeating what the dying Kammerer kept repeating: “So this is how David Kammerer ends.” In a letter to his father, Ginsberg transforms this into T.S. Eliot on the way the world ends, “not with a bang but a whimper.” Then he notes: “School otherwise is coming along. Chemistry was trouble, as usual.”

Robert Ast is a senior in the School of General Studies.
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