Kärlek Förtrollerska

Since the film was released on Blu Ray a couple of days ago I felt it was a good opportunity to talk about what actually happened back then. I am far from an expert on Beat poets, but I do know a thing or two about research and distortion of historical facts. So let’s have a look at what we do know.

Lucien Carr was born in 1925 - five years later his father left the family, leaving Carr’s mother to care for her son. When he was a teenager, he met David Kammerer through the Boy Scouts. It appears that Kammerer took an interest in him - more than he should have. Carr’s son, Caleb Carr, says:

First off, the facts of the case: David Kammerer did not begin his obsession, as you have rightly suspected, when my father was an adult: it began when my father was only twelve or so, and Kammerer was his Boy Scout troop leader (and the fact that my father later killed Kammerer with his Boy Scout knife is not something that any psychologist or detective I know would ever dare to call a coincidence). (1)

Caleb Carr goes on to describe how Kammerer courted and groomed his father, using many techniques that would nowadays immediately raise red flags. It’s important to understand, however, that these were very different times. A child could not make accusations against an adult and expect to be believed. In addition to that, the definition of masculinity was different back then; being raped by another man might have made Carr look ‘weak’ and 'effeminate’.

Caleb Carr also thinks that his grandfather’s absence from Lucien Carr’s life might have had something to do with his acceptance of Kammerer’s presence in his life. Kammerer would have been the first father figure in Carr’s life. All this is consistent with the typical sexual predator’s MO so this seems like a plausible explanation. Keeping both his emotional attachment and the social mores of the times in mind, it seems unlikely that Carr would have spoken up about any sexual transgressions between them. Carr’s mother must have known or suspected something was amiss, though, since she kept sending her sons to different schools. (2)

Lucien Carr tried to kill himself during his time at the University of Chicago - something his son never mentions in his essay. Some suggest this may be linked to Kammerer’s exploitation of Carr (Kammerer had followed him to Chicago) whilst others believe he was merely trying to create a 'work of art’ with this suicide attempt. At any rate, he was admitted to a mental hospital where he stayed between 2 weeks and 6 months (there was no reliable source readily available for this).

After this incident Carr’s mother took him to New York with him and enrolled him at Columbia University. This is where opinions and sources come to another clash.

Caleb Carr: 

So what brought my father to any kind of clarity on these issues, while at Columbia?

More than any other single relationship, it was his friendship with Jack Kerouac. Because Jack, despite Allen’s similarly vindictive attempts to portray him as at least bisexual and probably, in his heart of hearts (according to Allen) gay, was very much a “man’s man,” a lower middle-class football player whose friendship was my father’s first serious introduction to the “fraternity” (although I hate to use that word, as I, like all the males in my family, have always despised those organizations) of real male bonding. You can see this if you look at photos of my father before and after he met Jack: he evolves from being very much the blond, smooth-faced pretty boy to a darker, mustachioed adult man, very concerned about projecting just that image; and it was largely the friendship with Jack that brought that on. It was Jack with whom he shared heterosexual laughs and pursuits (and sometimes women), and it was the friendship with Jack that made him begin to see not only the inappropriateness, but the psychologically devastating and indeed criminal nature of his relationship with Kammerer. (3)

It’s interesting to note how Caleb Carr insists that both his father and Jack Kerouac are heterosexual. It seems very important to him to stress this time and time again whilst painting Ginsberg as the 'jealous gay man’. It’s also interesting to note that Caleb Carr either messed up the time line or simply lied about his father turning into some kind of super macho after meeting Kerouac. This is Lucien Carr after turning himself in to the police. No moustache, right? No super macho spewing testosterones.

(4)

The insistence that Jack Kerouac was also 110 per cent straight doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny. Friends say he had sexual encounters with both men and women and he discussed the possibility of his desiring gay sex somewhere deep down with Ginsberg (5).

It is therefore hard to say whether Caleb Carr has his own agenda in writing these things or if he honestly believes them to be true. But let’s move on to what happened in 1944 first.

Kerouac and Burroughs’s book 'And the Hippos Boiled In Their Tanks’ contains a scene of Kammerer admiring Carr and even sitting at his feet and mimicking his more extreme antics (chewing up a wine glass for example). Carr seems like the original Manic Pixie Dream Boy - wild, beautiful and breaking rules all of the time. At the same time he was talented without ever writing anything himself - in his obituary he was called 'a literary lion who never roared’. Carr was the life of the party and the soul of the group - and Kammerer came with him.

It appears that the group found his extreme devotion to Carr annoying, but they certainly liked him well enough. It is therefore unlikely that Carr told his new friends anything about prior abuse; Ginsberg was madly in love with Carr and good friends with Kammerer at the same time. 

In August 1944 Kammerer was looking for Carr and Kerouac pointed him to the bar where Carr was drinking at the time - again, it seems unlikely that he would have done that if he had suspected there was any danger in doing so. After the bar closed Carr and Kammerer went to Riverside Park to continue drinking. Now it is unclear why they fought. Carr said Kammerer threatened to kill Carr’s girlfriend Celine Young and Carr himself if he didn’t sleep with him. It is implied that he also tried to rape him and Carr was losing the fight against him before he finally stabbed him with his Boy Scout knife.

This was also the defense Carr used in court: he had been molested and was merely defending his honour when he killed Kammerer. It is impossible to know whether or not this is true. It would, however, not be surprising if it was true, given Kammerer’s earlier behaviour. Perhaps he felt like Carr was slipping through his fingers, having found good friends and a support system at last. Or maybe Carr had simply had enough, had just snapped.

He spent two years in prison for first-degree manslaughter.

Would the sentence have been as lenient if Carr’s mother hadn’t testified to Kammerer’s predatory behaviour at last? John Krokidas, the director of Kill Your Darlings, was shocked by this, was shocked by the fact that you could get off easily for such 'honour killings’. Whilst I agree that yelling 'gay’ should never be a defense for murder, it’s important to look at the actual circumstances of the murder.

Kammerer had most likely been abusing Carr for years and he had snapped at last. It’s impossible to tell whether he was actually threatened on this particular evening or if the anger of five years of being stalked and abused just needed an outlet.

What is shocking, inappropriate and disgusting is Caleb Carr’s reaction to Kill Your Darlings, however:

I guess what I’m saying, in sum, is that you’re right to consider my father the victim of a sustained campaign of criminal child abuse, and that is the real story behind “the murder that united the Beats.”  The irony about the movie, of course, is that the true story, insofar as I have pieced it together — and that’s as close, as I say, as anyone connected thinks it can be to reality — would have made a far more interesting tale: but it would not have served the sexual agenda of John Krokidas, of Daniel Radclliffe, or of the very extremist wing of the gay movement that they have demonstrated themselves as representing. A pity, but that is the disease of our times — the subordination of truth to agenda. It has stymied history, personal and national, and it has stymied politics. It may just be the end of the nation, for as James Madison wrote so long ago, only the “diseases of faction” can destroy a democracy. (6)

Undoubtedly Krokidas has said problematic things in the past (saying Kill Your Darlings is superior to Brokeback Mountain because he’s gay and Ang Lee isn’t, for example), but at the end of the day he is just a director. He’s a creative person looking to tell a good story. Daniel Radcliffe is an actor looking for interesting roles to play. It’s a film meant to entertain, not to accurately depict reality. Is it wrong to distort reality to serve a certain political agenda? Yes, yes, I believe it is. But at the same time, the psychological reality of what happened back then can never be accurately explained since Kammerer died before he could ever be taken to task for what he did to Carr and Carr never wanted to speak about the topic again.

If anything, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs turned out to be the sketchy characters in all of this: whilst they bemoaned the loss of Kammerer, they had no problem with supporting and staying friends with Carr for the rest of their lives.