by Jack Kerouac
“IF my book doesn’t sell, what can I do” that paragraph about the tightrope was true . . . you were speaking and seeing the truth. Even if you sold your book would that change anything now? The abyss is more real than present flesh or future fancy. What should you do?
“To find the western path . . .” or, apropos, not really so clear, though a poem: mine. I wrote 3 poems over the weekend.
You cannot tell the time it’s taken
To live into another life.
First the thought, beyond belief
Jams the mind; then the heart breaks;
Everything breaks down to soul.
Lives are changing, even Time
Time is nothing, all is all.
Can you believe me when I say my heart has been broken? My very heart, center of my existence. (What’s to come is still unsure.)
No, I don’t hate Neal; perhaps I really love him—basically we are all angels. I would rather be hated, than hate. I am afraid to hate. Maybe my shame is that I really hate him—you—Chase—Carr etc.
I once had a talk with Joe May35 about the Broken Heart. Told me I was too young—when I was 18-19 all you want to do is fuck. Then go fuck. You’re free. Stop worrying I tell you.
I didn’t mean to send you a picture as a lesson—though I hoped that all signs from god should be exchanged for their instructive value. I didn’t send it out of contempt.
I don’t really hate you. Love takes many forms. I mean, I, too believe in shelter from the cold, painless dentistry.
Believe me, if you compromise yourself on my account you are making a mistake. I realize how difficult it is for you to act sincerely to me because that involves so many conflicting rages. At the same time perhaps I was more surprised than you when I realized (in our conversation at Barbara [Hale]’s) that you were imitating me. For I have always felt that the other way around. I thought I was being “gleeful” like you. So you see it is a comedy of errors as usual. Pardon the silly tone of the above, but you must see, and I must see, that we are both being hypocritical. By an old mathematical law that makes us the same at bottom. We should amend our ways. Would you like to have it out with me violently? I should welcome that in the next few weeks. This is something you (at Harlem) spoke to me of, and I evaded; another time perhaps I spoke to you. Why don’t we take time out next time we meet and be honest, if possible, without compromising. I used to fear your glare of disgust. I still do, but then it was a fear of the unknown, the inconceivable. Now it is conceivable and welcome. However I won’t take it lying down. I may scream and shout.
I am a cosmic queer, that’s true; if you only knew what an isolated existence that exiles me to in comparison with your moderately healthy outlook in the universe.
Don’t you see we both suffer? Yes, of course you do. That really is the basis of our “friendship.” The secret knowledge of reciprocal depths—of hatred perhaps, but suffering and loneliness. That is why we are so tenderly hypocritical. That’s what I liked about Neal. He knew. That’s why also breaches of the unknown are good, are a good.
Come what may we will get our just deserts, from each other and the world. Nothing can be lost, nothing can be saved. So we must or I must not fear the unknown.
Let us be brothers from now on. You be my big brother. I am your little brother just out of college.
The abyss: you wonder, what if all your novel came to naught.
My poetry has in my deepest and surest knowledge come to naught—has come. I have been aware of that for ½ year. I cannot turn to it now for consolation except the merest vain and transitory security which disappears in an hour, and I also have begun to accept that. My rock, if I have one, is elsewhere now. It is just as well.
“Men come, men go.
All things remain in god”
(W. B. Yeats. Song of a Whore)
“I don’t understand”
“you ask what makes me sigh, old friend
What makes me shudder so?
I shudder and I sigh I think
That even Cicero
and many minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow”
Have you read W. B. Yeats’ poesy? I will give you the book for a temporary present this Xmas. I have studied him and he knows all the problems. You might enjoy reading him. Say no if it bores you. He has a voice like an echo chamber.
And others, others are there. Mr. Jethro Robinson, whom you will remember as a friend of Lucien and R. Weitzner in Colorado Springs now, has been writing a novel. He recently published a small pamphlet self printed—sonnets and other poems—he sells them himself at a dollar each. They are so wise they make me shudder jealously. Some of them are as good as Shakespeare—the secret of the open sea he knows. I sent for his pamphlet. I enclose the letter I sent him. See the undertone of despair and irony that old man Allen has in the version II I sent. I wrote it out on the paper you see, and copied it on a clean sheet to send him. Funny.
My next poem is entitled (curtsey)
Classic Unity.
It goes:See the twisting puppets twirled
In and out that changeless light.
As if they act beyond their world
They turn around the stage in fright.
All these puppets are the Lord,
Their tangled loins, his only rod.
Their mouths are bloodied with the Word.
Every eye is blind with God.
“Dead eyes see” or “Blind Vision” is what R. Weitzner points out in certain of my earlier poems as the true phrases. The rest, he says, have no content. He said that after I asked him, too, didn’t volunteer the information.
If I am temporizing after the crisis of your letter, it is because you didn’t come right out with it.
Important Announcement. I am leaving Paterson tonight for NY in 10 minutes. I think I am almost sure, hold your breath! I’m excited. I have a job! Hee hee hee! with Associated Press as a copyboy. O Rockefeller Center! O Life.
I have really been moved to your prescription of work, write, live. Once I get to NY I will live.
Jack Kerouac [Ozone Park, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]
ca. December 1948
Sunday afternoon
Home
Dear Allen:
Altho I read your letter only once, last night late arriving from town, I remember and am particularly pleased by your sincere reaction to my tired attack. However, none of this can be settled “violently”—as I often do with Lou [Lucien]—because there is no violent feeling, only a rarefied communication. It isn’t necessary for you to send me smutty pictures (the cock) because they don’t “scare” me, they only scare whoever reads my mail—“society,” I guess, for whom you apparently have respect (“A.P. you see is in Rockefeller Center.”) I am very glad that I got sore at you and that you wrote back so “stoutly.” And now we are on a good level and we might stay there, I don’t know. I see all your theories now for what they are; and mine too. The fact that 3-years of work on T & C turned out to be the delusions of a cracked madman doesn’t bother me any more, I had already gauged my chances there. As Pauline says, I have “two hands” and therefore I can earn my bread. The realization that art is cracked anyway (mostly) only makes me become a Factualist now. I will begin again with a Factualist art, perhaps a la Dreiser-Burroughs-“On the Road.” Like you, I consolidate my lines and move on. On our deathbeds we will realize one thing is as good as another anyway; as you yourself say, “nothing can be lost, nothing can be saved.” Relax.
And in any case half of life is death. This is my latest greatest thought. Psychoanalytically, it has made me realize that I associate home and mother and farms and Town and City etc. with a kind of childish immortality (the “genius,” etc., who will be redeemed.)—and that I associate the “outside world” (you and Neal and Bill and wars and work and hitch-hiking and cops and jails and taking my chances making women win-or-lose without childish remorse and petulance) I associate this outs
ide world with “half-of-life-is-death.” There is a tightrope only when you wish to be “immortal” (childish.) After that, it is solid but still as yet dangerous ground, but only the dangerous real ground of the forest which also has tigers and lions as well as lovers. To see all things as they are is of course the simplest truth—you can’t tell me that the tiger and the lion are lambs (I wouldn’t even care if they were.) They are lambs only in God. But in the world they are carnivorous. That is why you have to “look beyond” to God to find your stare through rock and stone, because you can’t do it in the carnivorous world that poured past us uncaring on Union Square. I like you again now that I see you as you are—and particularly, most “beautifully”, because you thought you were being “gleeful” with me and therefore I am given to see (naive of me I admit) that we were trying to please each other, I by hysteria, you by glee. The energy behind that is, even if deluded, fantasized, etc., is real. Because we were trying to live half of which is dying. Please, by the way, read these observations on “my level,” and not on your God-level . . . merely for the sake of digging at the moment. Your God-level is a beyond, and I buy it, but these explanations are of this world right now. By Factualism, also, I don’t mean Naturalism . . . but simply the acceptance of the fact that I will die, that half of life is death, that I am no better (no more privileged) than any one else, that I have to earn my bread, that I have to limit my love (in marriage), that I must make my way through “this world” as well as through the “beyond.” In fact, my whole theory now is that I have no theory. I am writing a paper for Slochower36 on the “Myth,” in which I will tell that pedant that Myth is nothing but concept built on a particular which is never repeated, sad tho to relate. I will go my way without concept, without “prevision” (Neal’s word), but only with a sense of my own and your own depth and depthlessness . . . like Lucien after all. And I begin to see that “it gets more and more joyous,” to repeat.
The only change I want from you is to see with your dead eyes. (he-he!) We will now be sad and perceptive and active, like Lucien after all. You must change also in the way you wrote to Jethro [Robinson] the former jerk—become a quiet old child. (he-he!) We will recall he-he! as our ignorant attempt to please each other, and it is just as real as Bill’s drawling act for Phil White et al. For the first time in a long time I feel a philosophical excitement running between you and me—because we decided we were hypocrites and move on knowing.
1949
Editors’ Note: After this flurry of letters, Kerouac rode with Cassady back across the country to San Francisco, but before long he returned by bus to his mother’s house in Ozone Park. In the meantime, Ginsberg had gotten himself into another terrible situation. He had allowed Herbert Huncke, Little Jack Melody, and Vicki Russell to store stolen merchandise in his apartment, and after a car crash the police discovered the stolen property and everyone, including Ginsberg, was arrested. The following letter was written from jail as Allen awaited the disposition of his case.
Allen Ginsberg [Long Island City, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]
ca. April 23, 1949
1 Court Square
Long Island City
New York
Sat. Morn
Dear Jack:
I have a restless anxiety about my journal and correspondence which was taken [by the police], otherwise am well in spite [of] a severe car crash and the uncertainty of the immediate future. My case is not too bad. Call up Eugene37 for details if you are interested in details—his office (he is acting as lawyer).
Herbert [Huncke] is across the cage; I can’t see him well as I lost my glasses in the crash. The few hours before the arrest were confused by the shock and horror—self-horror mostly as I saw patterns of activity so clearly. Everything happens in a suggestion of what will happen (to men I mean). I keep letting things happen to me, want them to.
You might notify Denison and his sister [Burroughs and Joan] what has happened. They (the police) also have your letters. I hope they are returned—5 years of literary correspondence that is a priceless treasure for the future.
Read the first few pages of “Rogue Male” (25¢ book) by Geoffrey Household. I kept thinking of that, after I got out of the overturned car.
I feel pretty well; wrote a poem:Sometimes I lay down my wrath
As I have lain my body down
Between the ache of breath and breath
and have to peaceful slumber gone.
All I tried to be so kind
All I meant to be so fair
Vanish, as the death of mind
Might leave a ghost alive in air
To gaze upon a spectral face
And know not what was fair or lost,
Remember not what flesh laid waste
or made him kind as ghost to ghost.
Allen
Editors’ Note: With the help of his family and a good lawyer, Ginsberg was released from jail. It was agreed that in lieu of prison he would go to a mental hospital for treatment. While arrangements were being made, Allen stayed at his father’s house in Paterson.
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]
ca. early May 1949
Wednesday Eve.
Dear Jack:
I am back, as you put it, in the bosom of my family. It’s quiet around here but I can get work done if I want to. I filled a 150 page notebook in the last four days with a detailed recreation of the events of the last month. This was for my lawyer who wants to get to understand me and find out why I associated with such people and did the things I did. He asked me to write him a journal. I didn’t work it out carefully, but in the writing (and before) I think I came to a clear understanding at last of [Herbert] Huncke and his total relationship with people; something I have been seeking for a long time, and the lack of which left me powerless to act towards him before in a positive way. I (perhaps we) had dehumanized him before. The nearest and clearest of him he himself obscured to us all; he needs a mate first like anybody else. The same with me, and Neal, too. I spoke of this to Vicki [Russell] and I found that she, too, had never realized just what Huncke secretly wanted from us, or we from him. I guess Bill knows Huncke.
My family problems have become more complicated and strange since my mother first was released from the hospital. She is living for the moment in the Bronx with my aunt. I saw her Monday. She is a little flighty, but natural, and my aunt doesn’t understand that; but she is a sister and there are other sisterly understandings. I don’t know what she will do, or be done, next. Gene and I will not live with her; I’m afraid to, and besides the doctors (at the hospital) forbid it; so that problem isn’t mine. But Naomi will have to be financed by my brother and father and aunt, and so that puts an added financial strain on them. Everything seems to have happened all at once.
I don’t know what is happening on my case; it is mostly out of my hands in the lawyers’. My family and lawyers are taking the attitude that I am in bad company, so that will make a lot of long range social problems for the future, since I’m so far in as far as having to (gratefully) accept their financial and legal aid. Also they would want me to betray and squeal on everybody to get myself out. It is past the point where I, like Huncke, can try to explain my position with any certitude on my part or assurance of understating, and so I am uneasy. Fortunately I know so little that I have little to squeal about. But presumably Vicki, Herbert, and Jack [Little Jack Melody] will try to arrange the guilt among themselves according to their own lights, and I fear to be maneuvered into some statement which will disrupt their own stories. The situation is delicate. Of course it won’t exist as anything meaningful in another (or 10) years. But at the moment I am prayerfully walking a tightrope. I would hate to have to pick up the toilsome balloon and try to maneuver my own lawyer to advance my case according to my own wishes; but that seems to be my present responsibility. At any rate, he thinks I will have to plead gu
ilty, have charges dropped, be placed in the hands of a psychiatrist; or take a suspended sentence with psychiatrist. I saw [Lionel] Trilling, who thinks I am crazy; and [Mark] Van Doren, who thinks I am sane but doesn’t sympathize beyond a limit (he kept winking at me as we talked). He wrote Morris Ernst, a big criminal lawyer. But it is too late for Ernst for my family already have arranged for lawyers. I also saw Meyer Schapiro38 (Trilling sent me to him.) He told me to come over, and sat talking with me about the Universe for 2½ hours; also told me about how he was in jail in Europe for being a stateless bum. He asked about you, apologized again for not being able to get you into his class. My problem, vis a vis the above with my lawyer, would be less complicated were it not for Bill’s letters, which make it imperative for me to settle on other terms than my own nearest and clearest and easiest, and get them out of harm’s way before lightning strikes Bill again. It’s possible; I am afraid to take chances. I have no idea how deep the Divine Wrath has been planned and will continue.
I am at present thinking a lot about Thomas Hardy’s poem “A Wasted Illness,” p. 139 of his Collected Poems, if you run across a copy. I wonder what Lucien thinks of it, or if he takes it (that particular poem) seriously? The poem is all clear, and as far as I am concerned especially the last stanza. It comes a page after the poem you drew my attention to at [Elbert] Lenrow’s house, “The Darkling Thrush.” I have also been reading Shakespeare—Macbeth. The irony of neglected and forgotten misunderstandings and complacencies returning like ghosts to wreak vengeance.
I would like you to come to Paterson.
Write me about Lucien. Has he told you his stories? Has he begun writing them? Also, please write Bill again, telling him, if you haven’t, the total situation. Tell him to clear his household of crime entirely, wherever he is. I said so. He doesn’t need it. Has Neal written?