by Jack Kerouac
Adieu. Write to Denison [Burroughs]—if necessary (have you his address?) care of Kells,41 at Pharr, Texas. I want to know what’s with him. Give him news from me. Tell him conditions are not propitious for a letter from me, but that I think of him. Also say I am liable to be silent for a considerable length of time, until I know in what sphere I am alive. Find out how he is. Please do this now, Jack.
Write me here. Has your family arrived? Are you all settled? It seems to me if you could as a veteran, you might get a loan for a house, and pay that out, instead of paying $75 a month for rent—but you have a lease, I see.
I enclose the ticket to the museum.42 Do you know that Lenrow is an ignu? He gave me the ticket to keep, instead of throwing it away; he not only realized that in my romantic way I would seize on the unused ticket as an object of nostalgia—but he offered it to me, with a pleasant comment about the possibility of my wanting it.
But, incidentally, the word Ignu is only for the Dennisons and Pomeroys of the world.
Also find a clipping from a magazine article on folk singing.
Oh lordy, dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones . . .
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac [Denver, Colorado]
June 15, 49
Dear Jack:
I got your letter today, so add this as a postscript to one which I wrote yesterday, and [the one] which you received a week ago. Great news: Pomeroy [Cassady]’s address in Frisco is 29 Russell St. I got a letter from Goodyear Service requesting information, so I sent them a recommendation of his vigor and imaginativeness, congratulating them on their association with him, assuring them he’ll give them satisfaction. Reminds me of the time he told [Hal] Chase’s woman to leave a note in her box. Poor Pomeroy, imagine him depending on beat out refugees like me to be his solid stable reference. Oh, what we dancing masters don’t have to endure. Well, write him; I will not (as with Denison [Burroughs] or anyone else) for a time; maybe just a couple of months. Give regards, explain events. Also, my lawyer tells me that I have been cleared by grand jury; no indictment, though Melody, Vicki, and Herb were indicted. I was not at hearing, did not even know it had taken place till later; fine lawyer is keeping me away from all the melee; all the war goes on in upper airs. Apparently an analyst, Van Doren, Mr. and Mrs. Trilling, and Dean Carman43 had to be present and speak; I don’t know any details. But I must say that’s mighty cricket of them all. I was really worried last month; and I had reason to be, except for work of others who assumed all the burden. I feel grateful. Shouldn’t I? That’s what Van Doren means by society I suppose; people getting together to keep each other out of trouble (or away from tragedy) till they got an inkling of what they’re getting into. Do you know, incidentally, that 22 years ago Van Doren wrote a little book on Light and E.A. Robinson, “It is not good, one can imagine Mr. Robinson saying, to know too much of anything; but it is necessary for great people thus to err—even while it is death for them to do so. Tragedy is necessary.” He ends beginning half of book so. In and out are comments like, “Bartholow, in other words, has seen too much; he is blinded by his light.” And “I have spoken more than once of the image of light as being the image in which he saw life reflected. The six poems are all concerned with men who have seen a light and who are both punished and rewarded for doing so.” I believe that Van Doren is talking about that specific miracle of vision which I have attempted to point to and specify the last year; his poems are about it; and in conversation with him it seems so; but since 22 years ago he has gone on beyond that light and seen its relationship to the world of time or “sober but hateful sanity”; I say gone on beyond not to mean that he has abandoned it or it him, but that it has assumed a new significance beyond its original occasional appearance as the actual existence of some transcendent fact; perhaps he has learned to see eternity in human laws, to put it bluntly, and god’s ways in organized society; perhaps he even believes now without a further thought any, even to us weak willed, complaint against lawbreakers and holds the lawbreakers responsible for some outrage against other men which they really were aware of; and if they (like me) were not aware of it it’s just as well that folks give them “a good slap in the face, so that they can hear the ring of iron.” The quote is from his lecture to me. Maybe he sees me and the hipsters hassling against society while cream and honey pour down unnoticed. Maybe he thinks its all a big secret joke, and that the trouble with me is that I am taking it (and myself) too seriously. In fact, these are his opinions. However he had an exaggerated idea of my self hood based on what recently he had been told by Hollander44 and others about my fancying myself as Rimbaud. Oh those pin-heads. Yes, he thinks I am taking myself too seriously. Is there anything more hateful to hear from a wise man? Jack, your book is a big balloon, you take yourself too seriously. And its true. O Lord what temptations thous placest in the way. Deliver me from my own thoughts and the thoughts of others, too, I think Van Doren probably thinks almost the same as you, that it’s all a matter for the giggling lings, so what’s all this intense investigation of evil.
Remember the discussion about prayer we had? I had this week a trembling on the edges of revelation again, and came up with a fish, half flesh, half abstract; no real revelation so no true fish (incidentally I do not believe that I will have any more guideposts of Light given free for a while now). I have been praying previously for God’s love; and to be made to suffer; and to be taken (I wish he’d pull my daisy); it says here in my (new) notebook, for June 14 “Say not, Love me, Lord,” but “I love you, Lord!” Only lately has this aspect of the way been clear to me in its meaning. You have said this in one form or another to me a number of times; and Claude [Lucien Carr] has told me the same. I was wrong.
Of your poetry. Yeats warns to beware of Hodos Chameliontos. You know what that is? (I was reading his autobiography, borrowed from Lenrow). That is a big dragon, all Chinese, except that it is a chameleon; and one minute you have one Chinese image, the next minute you are bumping along on a Mayan spider; and before you know it it turns into a North African porpentine, and an Indian geek, and a western cat.
“Worry therefore not for green, / And dark, which deceptive signs are, / Of golden milk./Beelzebub is just a lamb.” Or “Twas a husk of doves.”
Hodos Chameliontos is also worrisomely mechanical, and very abstract. Do you know that my lecherous wink is by now become so repetitious and stale and mechanical that I am caught with my pants down? This is because I am not dealing with real things; but abstract relations between values; on the basis of a true inspiration; but the inspiration is departed, the lesson remains and is repeated by rote with many changes of symbol but not of formula. But that is the way my mind works, in its illusory Beulah. Beulaah. Beulaaah. That is the trouble I suspicion in the Myth of the Rainy Night, as far as symbols are concerned; that also was what was wrong with my Denver birds and nightingales and dawns; I got so hung up on a series of words that I went around abstractly composing odes, one after another, until even now I can’t tell them apart and what they mean, and had, for instance, to throw all of the birthday ode of Willi Denison45 out the winder, when I was making up my book. That is what is the trouble with the “Divide where the rains and river are decided.” Well, you have worked out a myth for the symbol (rain being Time, events, things; the river and sea all the holy raindrops connected) (No?) and these are good and stable currency to work with; will you have trouble amplifying and extending? Eliot complains that Blake was, alas, a great minor poet, not a major one, since he made up a lot of crazy symbols of his own which nobody understands. Even I can’t read the weird beautiful prophetic books because they are full of Hodos. (I’m reading a commentary on them now by Mona Wilson) whereas I get not only understanding but the actual illumination of wisdom from the short “Ah, sunflower.” That is why you are so lucky and wise to be a novelist with an epic of storied events to work on; and why you are inclined (is this not so?) to leave the Myth of the Rainy Night a great big detailed f
able-story, and not (as I was trying to suggest,) an allegory with a big worked out symbolism. The Giggling Ling itself is not an aspect of Hodos, for instance, because in addition to its chinoiserie, it also winks out a stale real sound effect which gives it away; it is an actual emotion of reality reconstructed. So the thousands of details of Myth of Rain, will reveal themselves; not through an artificial system of thought. I hearken back to your letter to say, that the dirty ditty in my work comes from the feeling that I have that all I and other people secretly want is . . . also it’s happened to me several times that while walking up a rainbow, when I get to the other side I find not a pot of gold but a bedpan, full. But I am not disappointed, because shit is gold. What else would gold be, but that, and rain? or water? So that the key, has been to remind them (people) that the shroudy stranger has a hard on; and that the key to eternal life is through the keyhole; and so I make great big sensual hints; and not dirty jokes, mind you, but serious hidden invocations. And when someone will read it, and see, under the surface of my poem, as under the surface of his mind, a golden pole, and a holey goals, and a silver shower; I hope to accomplish someday an outright sensual communion; and as my love grows purer and less lecherous, when someone peeks under the surface of what I say, they will really be made love to. And not only that, I’ll have this long serious conversation with them, just as if the two of us were in the same head. And furthermore, it will only be under the surface for those who are themselves under the surface; but anybody truly akin will recognize it outright, because that’s what I’ll be talking about all the time right on top down front. And I will be writing about boys and girls in love in dreamland, like Blake, about the pale youths and white virgins rising from their graves in aspiration for “where my sunflower wishes to go;” and, “if her parents weep, / How can Lyca sleep?” and “abstinence sows sand all over / the ruddy limbs and flaming hair.” And if I find out any more about death, as other poets actually have, so they say, then I will have a way of communicating that too. Unfortunately, my present hang up is sexual and so I have recourse to that for key symbolism; but that in time will evaporate into a healthier and less frustrated truthfulness. Also, I learned from a mutual acquaintance, learned “In bodily lowliness, and in the heart’s pride / A woman can be proud and stiff (i.e. love is physical) / When on love intent, / but love has pitched his mansion / In the place of excrement.” That’s my favorite poem of all, because it is so literal, it has really only one meaning, and that’s what Yeats means. I am not just dirty to be cute; it’s partly that (when in a poem I say blows, not smokes the flower superfine); but because I am calling the attention of the poem and reader to a state of fact, which is hidden, either from consciousness, or real attention, if conscious. Yes, I too see [Robert] Herrick in his cups writing soft lyrics about his lady’s petticoats. Remember walking down the street, reading the Bible, shouting from Jeremiah, “The filth is in her Petticoats?”
Ah, yes, I remember well the road leading to Central City, and the small hills there. I was hoping you lived there. Pommy [Neal Cassady] and I once rode around there all over the side roads leaving firecrackers under people’s porches in the middle of the night. When you write, tell me how your mother is feeling about Denver, and what she says. Also, is there any difficulty about writing? I mean, about your receiving letters from me? If there is, we should do something practical to straighten out that. I could write care of general delivery.
Yes, however, I believe that Dennison is right, too.
When I next write—incidentally I will for sure be in the crazy house when I next write, so don’t worry—I will probably have finished a poem about the lines I wrote a while ago“I met a boy on the city street,
Fair was his hair, and fair his eyes,
Walking in his winding sheet,
As fair as was my own disguise.”
I have some of it written: it will tell Pommy; I am writing a prophetic poem for Pommy; it will see all, hear all, know all; I am the witness for Pommy, though he doesn’t know; it endeth:“And so I pass, and leave these lines
Which few will read, or understand;
If some poor wandering child of Time
Sees them, let him take my hand.
And I will take him to the Stone,
And I will lead him through the grave,
But let him fear no light of bone,
And fear no more the dark of Wave . . .
Followed by several more as yet unwritten stanzas describing the mansions of the Lord. Maybe I will also throw in, for good measure, that my name is angel and my eyes are fire, and that All Who Follow Shall Be Rewarded With My Favor.
May I have the title for “Tip My Cup,” to use bookishly? Also, think up more, and send them to me; better we will write our own mutual poem, and I will publish it in my book under your name, and you in yours in mine, and he and she in It’s. We’ll call it the Natural Top. Who shall it be dedicated to? Poe? Walter Adams?46 Ignu VII of Egypt? Oscar Bop? The survivors of Thermopylae? Bobby Pimples? Hysterical Larry?
Speaking of epileptics (and I promise you that this is the last time I mention Pommy’s name) do you know that Fyodor was, as you say, just like Pommy? I read a book written by Mrs. D. [Dostoevsky] describing the days when he was gambling in Baden, and how she used to weep and cry alone at home, expecting a baby, while Fyodor was gambling his last ruble, his last kopeck, even, and finally coming home, throwing himself weeping at her feet, offering to commit suicide to demonstrate his love for her, and making her give him her shawl off her shoulders so that he could pawn it to play some more. She poor wretch, didn’t know what to do, prided herself on being understanding, and then felt justified when one day he came home with a fortune he’d won; they celebrate, and then he goes out and loses it all the next day; and all starts up again, and happens every week and goes on for weeks and weeks and months, and a whole half year, with hysterical scenes and pacifications and entreaties every other night, like a hotel room in Denver, until at last he’s so beat that he can’t go on—he hasn’t any more money, blames himself, cries that he is a failure. Finally he falls at her feet sobbing like an injured child, helpless and in an epileptic; so she bundles him up in her coats and takes him down the R.R. station and they go to Russia. What a great, mad book, by Mrs. D. Probably in Denver Library. Years later he writes about it (in a few letters) and what he says about her, sounds like a wise and aged Pommy recollecting his own lifetime. But a wise and aged Pommy, naturally still vigorous, much more insight, on account of years. If you are curious what Pommy might be really truthfully (to self) thinking in years.
See, I have without planning, spent hours writing you. I hereby present them to you as a gift, free. No strings.
Allen
Editors’ Note: After waiting for nearly two months Ginsberg was finally admitted to the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on West 168th Street in Upper Manhattan.
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [Denver, Colorado]
ca. June 29, 1949
From the Wizard of Paterson
To the Wizard of Denver
Mon Cher Jean Louis:
Enfin J’ai arrivais au maison du Koko; ici les animaux sont tres interresant, il y est un homme in de vinget et n annees, une surrealiste qui me fait riri avec son inspire imagination fauve, et aussi son weltanschaunung est comme cela de M. Denison [Burroughs], mais ce jeune homme ci (tres laid) est une jinf de Brom/ et anssi une Hipster. Mais il est fou. Ech, ce francois ci m’enneri.
The atmosphere is weird. I have an idea (how true it is I will I suppose find out soon enough) that the attendants have not too clear an idea as to the nature of madness; to them it is characterized by absurdity or eccentricity mostly. I rather had hoped to come to a judgment of my soul under the clear light of sane eyes. Tomorrow night we see a performance of Rumpelstiltskin, however.
Ecrivez moi, ecrivez moi, j’attend, faisey-vous l’effort de etre du moins au moins un pen
balance et grave, pas trop fou (perhaps it will improve your literary style?) mais ecrivez avec une style libre anyway. The mail is read before it gets to me. Say what you want, but don’t write me tracts suggesting that I dynamite the establishment for instance. I mean, they may take offense.
Love,
Allen
Give me news of whoever is newsworthy.
OK. I got a mad long letter from [John Clellon] Holmes—asking me about my soul. I replied at great length. He kept disclaiming personal interest and insisted that he was interested in the Visionary in relation to the Lyric Poem, and the processes of literary creation. It would be a big joke on me if he was really interested in cold facts. He is at Cape Cod. No news from or to Claude [Lucien Carr]. I am now a bleak prophet. (Bleak eternity) (Bleak heavens) (Bleak smile) I have come to love the word bleak, it suggests just the quality of timeless joy possible that I feel in a key.
Jack Kerouac [Denver, Colarado] to
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York]
July 5-11, 1949
July 5, 1949
6100 W. Center Ave.
Denver 14, Colo.
Dear Allen:
I admire you for delivering yourself to an actual bughouse. It shows your interest in things and people. Be careful while convincing the docs you’re nuts not to convince yourself (you see, I know you well.) Isn’t it interesting that Holmes’ letter demanding information about your soul should reach you there? Relax on the roof and get fresh air anyway.