by Jack Kerouac
Alas! I am sorry about the Admiral the other Saturday. My absence was unavoidable as I explained in the postcard I sent last night. I am feeling much better now, although for a day I was so sick that I found myself worrying about the future of man’s soul, my own in particular. Did you show up? What did you do, what did you think, how did you curse in my absence?
I have been reading while in bed, since it was the only thing for me to do. I finished The Way of All Flesh, at last, Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, neither of which I was particularly moved by. Now I have begun, at last, War and Peace and am finished with 825 pages of it. I do not think that I like Tolstoi as much as Dostoevsky (whatever the confession means), but I am enjoying myself with W&P more than any novel I’ve read since The Idiot. I enclose Trilling’s letter. [ . . . ]
Allen.
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?] to
Allen Ginsberg [Sheepshead Bay, New York]
September 6, 1945
Thursday night Sept. 6
Dear Allen,
Your little letter moved me, I must say . . . particularly the line, “I was so sick that I found myself worrying about the future of man’s soul, my own in particular.” There you elicited the true picture of things terrestrial . . . namely, disease and loss and death. I like the way Rilke faces these facts in his un-bourgeois way, and I must say I don’t particularly approve of forgetting the facts of life and death in an orgy of intellectual pseudo-synthesis . . . Shelley’s “dome of white radiance” has become a sort of rose-coloured dome now, shedding technicolor pinkness on us all. However, I don’t think there’s much point in telling you all this because I know you don’t represent the average intellectual softy. Or punk.
Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become . . . and you must admit that I am in closer touch with public vulgarity than any of us. Although Bill reads the Daily News also, I go him one better, alas, and take the trouble to listen to the radio . . . and suffer myself onto P.M. as well. Archetypal morality in its modern high-pressure Orson Welles O.W.I. [Office of War Information] and Hearst regalia—you see, there are no right and left distinctions, and never were, in spite of what I think the Lancasters and Fritz Sterns12 would say—have become for me a kind of windmill to my Quixote . . . I think of what Joan Adams and Kingsland would say about all this; this makes of me a most ludicrous figure. I’m wrestling with the passé . . . that’s what you’re probably thinking. Well, let’s have no more of this for now . . .
News of Burroughs is what you want . . . I haven’t seen him and I don’t know where he is. However, I’ve mailed a card to the University Club in the hopes that it will be forwarded to him, and he may let me know where he is. Gilmore’s roommate, Francis Thompson (!) is under the impression that Bill is still in New York . . . Gilmore himself is staying at a cottage on Cape Cod writing a novel. The reason why Bill disenrolled from Sheepshead is because he wanted to go in the MM [merchant marine] as a purser, and very likely they wouldn’t see it his way . . . Francis believes that Bill is going to try again. That about sums up all I know about Burroughs for the present, but the moment I’m in receipt of his new address, it shall be sent on to you. There remains but one additional item re Burroughs . . . Joyce Field says he is “leprous.” That I must tell Bill . . .
I was moved by your letter, I repeat. Partly because you’d been and still are sick . . . Partly because of Trilling’s letter, which represents something I’d like to happen to me someday, namely, to be liked and admired by someone like him. Although there’s something a little wearying about his emphasis on “effect” in poetry, that letter he wrote you is certainly a marvelous example of how an entrenched man of letters can inspire confidence in a young poet. There’s something French about it . . . I mean, it smacks of Mallarmé encouraging the young author of Le Cahier d’Andre Walter [André Gide]; or of [Paul] Verlaine praising the tempestuous provincial lad in a letter addressed to Charleville; or of Gide bestowing his warm appreciation and admiration on the young and unknown Julian Green. I say all this gauchely in my haste, but honestly I envy you. I think we none of us realize the importance, nay the sweetness, of admiration; it is one of the dying virtues of character. Look for instance at the way Lucien [Carr] is neurotically resented all around Columbia by a lot of bloodless fish who couldn’t out-argue him or something, or who couldn’t get away with wearing red shirts and striking white masks on the streets, as he did. A recent visit at Columbia, where Carr is still very much in evidence, reveals, I suppose, and to coin a pat and disgusting phrase, the neurotic nature of our times . . . Here are all these jerks snarling out of the corners of their mouths at everything—and particularly at Lucien. There is none of the loving perception of “Look! Look!” . . . no one grabs your arm eagerly to seduce you sweetly with a point . . . there is no Germanic enthusiasm, no thick guttural cries . . . just so much monotonous epigram-making, and as far as that goes, there are no Oscar Wildes at Columbia. Save Wallace Thurston, of course . . .
I was there and I saw Celine Young, Joyce Field, Grover Smith, Joan [Adams] and John [Kingsland], Auerbach the sophomoric bore, Wallace Thurston, [Arthur] Lazarus (who asked about you), and others I can’t remember. Celine got drunk and showed me a letter from [Hal] Chase. She says they’ve broken up, but I don’t think they have . . . It would have amused you to see the wonderful understanding Celine and I reached that night: just like brother and sister, it was, all except the wrestling. But vraiment, I think Celine is a remarkable girl . . . She’s lost fifteen pounds, she looks like something out of Mann’s sanatorium—ineffable, beautiful, self-corroding doomed, a bit mad. She told me, with a melancholy air, that Lucien did not love her and that he would in the future seek his love elsewhere . . . she added to that, that no girl could satisfy Lucien. I was so kind to Celine that night . . . Do you know, Allen, that Celine and I can never again be lovers? It’s as though she wanted me more as a brother . . . And I’m inclined to like it, since she’s lost all sex-appeal to me in a sort of mystic immolation of desire. But the maddening thing! . . . she’s resigned herself to all kinds of fates, including an affair, mind you, with Don Kahn! The situation is straight out of Dostoevsky, my little friend! Look at it this way: she likes Edie [Parker Kerouac] a great deal and reserves the right thereby to ask for my friendship. Secondly, she has always desired my confidence. Everything but romance, as it were. Finally, in view of all that, she decides to have affairs with anyone who wants her . . . Now she says she doesn’t want Chase any more; she speaks of that Kahn fellow. I can’t get over the irony of all this. I feel more and more like Myshkin13 as time goes on . . . I am in love with a lot of people at this moment, and Celine no less than the others. Being the sensual Breton, it is hard for me to resist sex in relations with women. But here I find myself gladly playing the father-confessor, the sympathetic Raskolnikov to her Sonia,7 while her charms are reserved, as by tacit agreement, for a bunch of nobodies. O merde à Dieu! The novelty is there, of course, and I am young enough to wade into new ponds. And anyway I’m going to California in October . . .
I asked Edie to meet me at Columbia this weekend. There’s going to be a sort of get-together, which will include Edie, Joan, John, Grover, Celine, Kahn, myself, and I hope, Burroughs—if I can locate him. We will drink a toast to you, I’ll see to that. Though Kingsland may giggle and Burroughs smirk and Edie turn up the corner of her mouth and Joan make a crack and Celine smile sweetly and Grover make a pun, I’ll suggest a toast to our bed-ridden little copain.
Your curiosity regarding la soiree d’idiocie is understandable. True, I did feel remorse . . . So much so as to cancel an appointment with Burroughs for the next day, which probably bored him altogether. He has no patience for my kind of neurosis, I know . . . But since then I’ve been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge. You understand, I’m sure. Remember that the earlier part of my life has always been spent in an atmosphere vigorously and direct
ly opposed to this sort of atmosphere. It automatically repels me, thereby causing a great deal of remorse, and disgust. There is a kind of dreary monotony about these characters, an American sameness about them that never varies and is always dull . . . Like a professional group, almost. The way they fore-gather at bars and try to achieve some sort of vague synthesis between respectability and illicitness . . . That is annoying, but not half so much as their silly gossiping and snickering. If they were but Greeks, things would take on a different tone altogether. I am repelled, then, largely by these social aspects, an overdose of which I got that night. As to the physical aspects, which as you know, disgust me consciously, I cannot be too sure . . . whatever’s in my subconscious is there. I am not going to play the fool about that. My whole waking nature tells me that this sort of thing is not in my line. It keeps on telling me. It drums in my nature, telling me, until I begin to suspect its motive. But I shan’t worry my pretty little head about it anymore. I think that in the end it will just be a matter of “Drive on!”—you have heard that story about Phil the junky, haven’t you? I shall let my neurosis dissolve in the white fire of action, as it were. Strangely, the thing that annoys me the most is the illusion everyone has that I’m torn in two by all this . . . when actually, all I want is clear air in which to breathe, and there is none because everybody’s full of hot air. The remorse you detected in my last letter is not all for the reasons you imagined . . . Once I was in bed with a girl, down in Baltimore; I had picked her up in a bar and she promised me she would come across. When we got to bed, she fell asleep and couldn’t be awakened . . . I spent the whole night wrestling around with her limp rag of a body, as she snored. It is a horrible experience, that . . . You feel remorse the next day, ashamed of your desire; perhaps you feel like a necrophiliac, maybe there’s a fear of necrophilia in all of us, and this business of wrestling around with an unconscious woman is the closest thing there is to necrophilia . . . Well, that’s the kind of remorse I felt, for exactly the same reasons. But I knew there would be no clear air vouchsafed me the next day . . . There was no one I could tell the story to who wouldn’t in return blow a lot of hot air my way . . . It’s almost as though my neurosis were not ingrown, but that it was the result of the air, the atmosphere around me. For there are a lot of horrible things I’ve done in my life, in the dark away from everything, and not only to me. I am not a Puritan, I don’t answer to myself; rather, I’m a son of Jehovah—I advance with trepidation towards the scowling elders, who seem to know about every one of my transgressions, and are going to punish me one way or the other. As a little boy, you know, I started a very serious forest fire in Massachusetts . . . and it’s never worried me in the least, because I’ve had only my own blithe self to answer to for that crime . . . If on the other hand, I’d been caught, I would have suffered terribly. This then, is the kind of remorse I felt . . . But that too is now purged . . . I trust.
You shouldn’t have been “distressed” by the tone of my last letter. It was only a mood . . . and a not malevolent one either, not at all. It was all done as an older brother. Sometimes you give me such a feeling of superiority, say, moral superiority, that I can’t restrain myself . . . Other times, I feel inferior to you—as I doubtlessly do this moment. I’m afraid that you’ll never understand me fully, and because of that, sometimes you’ll be frightened, disgusted, annoyed, or pleased . . . The thing that makes me different from all of you is the vast inner life I have, an inner life concerned with, of all things, externals . . . But that would be discussing my art, and so intimate is it become that I don’t want to babble about it. You may deplore the fact that I’m “shepherding artistic problems back to the cave,” but it’s certain that that’s where they indeed belong. The bigger and deeper this inner life grows, the less anyone of you will understand me . . . Putting it that way may sound silly, it may particularly amuse Burroughs, but that’s the way it is. Until I find a way to unleash the inner life in an art-method, nothing about me will be clear. And of course, this places me in an enviable position . . . it reminds me of a remark Lucien once made to me: he said: “You never seem to give yourself away completely, but of course dark-haired people are so mysterious.” That’s what he said, by God . . . Then you yourself referred to a “strange madness long growing” in me, in a poem written last winter . . . remember? I just thrive in this, by God. From now on, I think I’ll begin to deliberately mystify everyone; that will be a novelty.
After all my art is more important to me than anything . . . None of that emotional egocentricity that you all wallow in, with your perpetual analysis of your sex-lives and such. That’s a pretty pastime, that is! I’ve long ago dedicated myself to myself . . . Julian Green, among others has one theme in all his work: the impossibility of dedicating oneself to a fellow being. So Julian practices what he preaches . . . There is just one flaw: one yearns so acutely to dedicate oneself to another, even though it’s so hopeless . . . There’s no choice in the matter.
I was telling Mimi West last summer how I was searching for a new method in order to release what I had in me, and Lucien said from across the room, “What about the new vision?” The fact was, I had the vision . . . I think everyone has . . . what we lack is the method. All Lucien himself needed was a method.
I understand Trilling’s impatience with the High Priest of Art . . . There is something phony about that. It’s the gesture adopted when the method doesn’t prove to be self-sufficient . . . after awhile the gesture, the Priestliness, begins to mean more than the art itself. What could be more absurd?
But let’s not let the whole matter deteriorate, as I feel it will in mentalities such as Trilling’s—that to adopt art with fervor and single-minded devotion is to make the High Priest gesture. No, there’s a distinction to be made, without a doubt.
So goodnight for now . . . About the Admiral [Restaurant], I’d received your card in time and so was forewarned. I’m keeping Trilling’s letter for awhile in order to show it to a few people: this must make you realize that the quality of my friendship for you is far purer than yours could ever be for me, you with your clay-pigeon complex. There’s nothing that I hate more than the condescension you begin to show whenever I allow my affectionate instincts full play with regard to you; that’s why I always react angrily against you. It gives me the feeling that I’m wasting a perfectly good store of friendship on a little self-aggrandizing weasel. I honestly wish that you had more essential character, of the kind I respect. But then, perhaps you have that and are afraid to show it. At least, try to make me feel that my zeal is not being mismanaged . . . as to your zeal, to hell with that . . . you’ve got more of it to spare than I. And now, if you will excuse me for the outburst, allow me to bid you goodnight.
[ . . . ]
Jean
Allen Ginsberg [n.p., Sheepshead Bay, New York?] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?]
after September 6, 1945
Dear Jack:
I got your letter yesterday. I said to Joan [Adams] when I saw her in the W.E. [West End Bar] “Celine [Young] reminds me of Natasha or whatever her name was in the Magic Mountain.” Your remark to the same end in your letter—is this telepathy? Thus surprised me Joan didn’t agree though. I think she’s thinking of the healthy Celine, paramour of the up and coming lawyers (though that somewhat fits in with Mann, even.) As you have been father confessor of late, I have been brother (or sister?) confidante for some years now and I know the feeling; I suspect that there’s some transferred libido in the role.
As there is also, I suppose, in my and Bill’s sharp curiosity vis à vis your various affaires de folie. The assumption on my part (now half habitual) of your double nature and the conflicts there from—“the illusion that everyone has that I am torn in two by all this,” was formerly a sort of half prurient wish-fulfillment. You have got me there. Still you can not arrive at a verdict yourself—that in a sense you are being persecuted by an atmosphere—so easily as you do by “as it were
” dissolving it in the white ice of action. I am repelled by the atmosphere of Larry’s and Main Street, and by [Bill] Gilmore’s patterns of innuendo, at the same time I find myself revolving about in that particular universe (to use a phrase of yours). It is much the same with you; after all, the atmosphere is one that you have chosen from other than aesthetic impulses, you are also drawn by a prurient curiosity which you are conscious of I suppose. You could even accept them (these posy people) as Greeks, though you have contempt and some fear for them as they are. And the “remorse” that you feel is avowedly exteriorized, you are afraid of Burroughs’s inquisitive sardonicism, of external consciousness of your fatal flaws. Burroughs or Gilmore are perhaps trying to drive you to this level, you on the other hand provoke them by manifestations of fear, by trying to maintain yourself on another level from them and ignoring or rationalizing all evidences to the contrary. You are more Greek than Gilmore, and more American than Greek, and so you need not be so tense about it.
I don’t enjoy sitting at your feet being thrown into consternation by fits of divine madness—alternately “frightened, annoyed, disgusted or pleased.” You are not a toy you know, nor am I a well meaning simpleton ineffectually trying to fathom you. At the same time your conservation of speculative energy and growing aloofness in a promiscuous exhibition of your wares hit me as another corridor in the gamut of emotions, on surprisingly Burroughsian and (I bow) mature in the line of development. Your art is as you say more important to you than anything, mine is an emotional egocentricity. I accept this because I would relegate art to a purely expressive and assertive tool—here I am more Rimbaud, I think. And for me its equal purpose is as a tool for discovery. But the assertion—myself—and the discovery—external—are my aims; I am dedicated to myself. It is you who do not recognize the impossibility of dedicating yourself to your fellow-beings, you are dedicated to your art. My art is dedicated to me.