Lucien Carr - Early Life

Early Life

Carr was born in New York City; his parents, Marion Howland (née Gratz) and Russell Carr, were both offspring of socially prominent St. Louis families. After his parents separated in 1930, young Lucien and his mother moved back to St. Louis; Carr spent the rest of his childhood there.

At the age of 14, Carr met David Kammerer (b. 1911), a man who would have a profound influence on the course of his life. Kammerer was a teacher of English and a physical education instructor at Washington University in St. Louis. Kammerer was a childhood friend of William S. Burroughs, another scion of St. Louis wealth who knew the Carr family. Burroughs and Kammerer had gone to primary school together, and as young men, they traveled together and explored Paris’s night life: Burroughs said Kammerer “was always very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without any middle-class morality.” Kammerer met Carr when he was leading a youth group of which Carr was a 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 later insist, as would his friends and family, that Kammerer had been hounding Carr sexually with a predatory persistence that would today be considered stalking. Whether Kammerer’s attentions were frightening or flattering to the younger man (or both) is now a matter of some debate among those who chronicle the history of the Beat Generation. What is not in dispute is that Carr moved quickly from school to school: from the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine to the University of Chicago, and that Kammerer followed him to each one. The two of them socialized on occasion. Carr always 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."

Carr’s University of Chicago career ended quickly and badly, with an episode that concluded with the young man putting his head into a gas oven. He explained away this act as a “work of art,” 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. 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.

If Marian Carr was seeking to protect her son from David Kammerer, she did not succeed. Kammerer soon quit his job and followed Carr to New York, moving into an apartment on Morton street in the West Village.

William Burroughs also moved to New York, to an apartment a block away from Kammerer. The two older men remained friends.