by Jack Kerouac
In connection with this sort of thing, let me quote from an article I read last night in the Pharr Gazette, by a certain M. Denison [Burroughs] (a local editor with a fiery temper): He says, about another farmer in the region, called Gillette [Allen Ginsberg], who was taken to a sanatorium in Houston after he killed his wife:—“What’s with Al Gillette talking about the Wrath of God? Has he flipped his lid? We have the W. of G. down here in the shape of Border Patrol agents, deporting our field hands, and D. of Agriculture Beaurocrats telling us what, where and when to plant. Only us farmers have other names for it. And if any obscenity bunch of beaurocrats think we’re going to sit on our (ass) and let the W. of G. take over, they will learn that we are not Liberals.” (!) (Notice the spelling—beaurocrat, a kind of southern plantation spelling, a Missouri aristocrat spelling.)
The editor goes on (in Immortal Complaints in the Chaunce [sic] of Time):—“If your editor were in Gillette’s place he would say ‘Go ahead and place your charges, if any.’ ” (The editor considers Gillette innocent in the case, which took place in Clem, Texas.) “His present position is insufferable. Imagine being herded around by a lot of old women like Louis Gillette [Louis Ginsberg] and Mark V. Ling [Van Doren]. Besides I don’t see why V. Ling puts in his 2 cents worth. Sniveling old Liberal fruit . . . All Liberals are weaklings, and all weaklings are vindictive, mean and petty. Your editor sees nothing to gain from this Houston deal. A lot of New Deal Freudians. Your editor wouldn’t let them croakers up there treat his corn let alone his psyche.”
After reading this amazing editorial I called up Denison, and among other things he said to me: “I have just done reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy. I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy he’s a F——genius.” He added, concerning the editorial: “The overpaid beaurocrats are a cancer on the political body of this country which no longer belongs to its citizens.”
Incidentally I am going down there to visit, in August.
Sad things happened in Denver. My mother was lonely and beat, and went back to New York yesterday and got her shoe-factory job back. She is right, as usual. I’ll explain later. So I am moving back to New York and will live there forever now. My mother is a great trooper—wants to earn own living.
Also, Edie [Parker Kerouac] and I are practically back together again, by mail. Now that I sold my book she is most interested in me. She said “When you’re a Hollywood writer and live in a big mansion, I have first dibs for parasiting off of you.” I am going to try to make her go to school in New York this fall (she studies Floralculture.) Her mother married the Berry of the Berry Paint, and they all live in a mansion on Lake Shore, Detroit, now; Edie has a room in the tower (!) And in the Spring I will bring her to Paris with me, and write Doctor Sax. If I have enough money by then I am definitely financing your own Voyage there. I envision a season in New York and then an Immense Season in Paris in 1950 (including Claude [Lucien Carr], and even Vern [Neal Cassady] if I am rich enough.) If I become rich we’ll all be saved by overcoming the bigness of the night, the red, red night.
Well I began writing “The Rose of the Rainy Night” this week, to amuse myself while doing On the Road and to prepare for the “Myth [Doctor Sax].” “The Rose” is a big Spenserian work of many cantos. It opens: “So doth the rain blow down
Like melted lutes, their airs condenst,
And water harps and waterfalls
And all manner of concertina
Th’arcanums of the night alluring.”
As you see, it isn’t so good, but I’ll fix it. I merely put down what comes into my head, though not recklessly. This way, I’ll pile up a big Rose and have something to pluck out, petals:—“Unfolding petal—A me peloria!—
The rose of the rain falls open,
And drooping lights the sky
With firkins of softest dew.”
[ . . . ]
However, now I understand poetry and am just going along. My prose has improved because of these studies. I’ll just copy one sentence, it would be too much, you’ll read it all later:
“And by and by all the lights but one dim hall-light were out, and the men were shrouded in May-night sheets, preparing their minds to sleep.” This is in a jail. The hero, Red, is listening . . . “To his right Eddy Parry seemed to moan, alone; to roll his own bones on the hard, hot pad; unless he moaned to someone in the next cell further.”
This demonstrates the utter gravity and importance of our poetic experimentations, for they reach the rational atmospheres of the prose-sentence as in Melville’s prose make it more than that, much, much more.
Here again, the influence of pure preoccupations with language appearing in, and strengthening, the scaffolded exigencies of the reasonable and light-of-day prose sentence—
“And when the silence increased, then it was possible for Red and anyone else who was awake and listening, to hear the great sea-roar of New York outside: the rumorous Saturday night stretching its tide far over the wash of the vast eventful plain—with its towering Knight-island, and basins, and outreaching apian dark flats to Rockaway, and to Yonkers cliff, to blue-shawled New Jersey, and the Jamaican reaches that guttered like altar waxes on the hooded horizon—the Saturday night of ten million secret and furiously living souls to which Red, now considering it half-heartedly and half drowsy, would soon return, himself a secret and furious and excited motion in that ocean of life antique. For what reason? Why had he no wild interest in the mere day? the mere night? in here? anywhere?”
But later that night Red has a vision (all minutely and swirlingly described) and is Resurrected out of Glooms:—
Among his visions are:
“Now, inexplicably, he was sitting in the movie looking avidly at the crazy-serious gray screen and what it was showing; and looking at the curtains beside the screen, and even at some hunchbacked old man with a top hat who scowled there beside a stepladder. He then saw a kind of vision of a candy bar, an immense Mr. Goodbar—a candy he always ate as a kid in movie,—and began eating it slowly from the corner inwards, peanut by peanut, all hunched over it with hugging delight. Also, it was raining outside, but warm and dark in the movie where he jubilantly lay hidden with his feet on the forward seat. It was the Marx Brothers on the screen, with everything going mad and almost exploding, Harpo hanging from a rope from the attic window, Groucho gliding in the marble hall with a lion, something collapsing, a woman screaming in the closet. And then it was a western movie, Buck Jones in arid plains rolling along in clouds of dust on a big white horse—a rainy gray myth on the screen, the myth of the gray West, with crooks in vests pursuing behind on ordinary horses, and another posse roaring in from the creaky rickety town. A big face appeared on the screen turning slowly in profile, a man’s face with fluttering eyelashes. Who was this? Vern?”
Red has all these visions, it’s his last night in jail, and finally he says a prayer on his knees. Then begins the Pilgrimage hitch-hiking with benign imbecilic Smitty to California to look for his father, whom he only finds the following winter gambling in Montana saloons, after many dusty travails and crazy rides around the country with Vern, and many things including my own version of the Dark Angel and the Madman (remember Dostoevsky at the Apollo?) (In San Francisco this.) Finally everybody leaves and Red’s alone, and that’s where the story ends. This is I. (Also, there’s a Mystic Tenorman who hitch-hikes around the country and Red keeps running into him, a wild colored cat, until Red’s scared; he even sees him in the middle of the night walking in the Mansion of the Snake, the Bayou of New Orleans, with his Tenor Horn, and steps on the gas.) This is like the shrouded stranger. On the Road is the name of this opus; I want to write about the crazy generation and put them on the map and give them importance and make everything begin to change once more, as it always does every twenty years. When I die I’ll be a shroud swimming in the Parade on the
River, with skinny white arms and Lotus-Eyes, and that will be that, at night.
Thank you for telling me about Hodos Chamelientos. I’m reading Eliot and Crane and Dickinson and Robinson and even Keinvarvawc (a Celtic poet) and The Faerie Queene. More later. See you in September.
Old friend
Jack
1. Brierly invited me to a big party for Lucius Beebe here. He claims to be the “last of the Bourbons” and is a big fake . . . that is, he says the world interests him only insofar as it offers “the last remaining best things.” He’s always plastered, and not happy drunk, either. I met Thomas Hornsby Ferrill and all the big society of Denver. I behaved like a fool. I yelled and told dirty stories and got drunk. Then I came back to my shack in the hills here, and rested and mused. I am surrounded day in day out by hordes of children and dogs, who come in the house. Today there were a thirteen-year old girl, a six-year old girl, a four-year old boy, an infant, a bird-dog, a mud-hound, two Chihuahua dogs and a cat. The thirteen-year old girl wrote a story on my typewriter about the Giant in the garden and the little children who were afraid to go in because they thought the garden door was locked, but it wasn’t at all and the door opened, and they went in, and the Giant cried with joy. This proves to me that children really know more than adults. Children are preoccupied with the same things Shakespeare knew . . . gardens and fairies and enchanted islands and Giants and wizards and the whole stock of what might be called Metaphorical Cerebration in the Metaphysical Phantasy.
Is this not so?
Am I the Giant?—the one in the garden? Of course I am.
I love these little children and I love the Rubens countryside here and I am sorry that the whole world is not one small garden so everybody could be together all the time before they die and rot in the grave. And I will love Edie again before she goes.
Do you know what I think of the mind?—that it is made of various ordered myths, each with a direction of its own, and a hope (foolish or not); and that when you analyze and dissect these ordered myths (associative constellations) you shatter them and in their place erect One White Myth of Reason, which then arbitrarily directs and commands you; all that has happened is a loss of riches. The mind may become more coherent, but an organic tangle of vines is gone. Just as a jungle can be torn down for a cement factory. All the vines and the flowers and the cockatoos and the tigers go, and they make cement in noisy dusts. I see no reason to laud this. It is just another foolish mistake of man’s. Centuries from now he will laugh and play.
The Denver Birds? I know a kid here who believes that everybody should be happy at his little job, making cement, etc., and be predictable so the Social Scientists can keep their papers in order. I feel like that fellow Denison. It’s all a big mistake, everything but the flesh, and the mind is the flower petal of the flesh. It is the same juice as the flesh. Albert Schweitzer47 is at present saying this at the Aspen Goethe Festival here. I would love to hear his lecture in French tomorrow.
My editor [Robert] Giroux is flying out next week and Brierly and I are taking him to the Central City opera. It is very possible I will fly back with him, so I’ll see you soon perhaps, if they allow it. I wish you would place your weary bones in lesser inaccessible demesnes . . . like the Dixie hotel or something, or Pokerino, or the Mills Hotel, or the Waldorf-Astoria. What fun is there in the Medical Center? Hey? What is it that finds you there?
(wink)
P.S. Hal [Chase] is dead.
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [Denver, Colorado]
July 13-14, 1949
July 13, 1949
Wed. Eve.
Dear Jack:
Comprenez, I did not deliver myself to an actual bughouse to see what it was like in the sense that you meant, things and people. Write a letter to the editor—tell him that I take my madhouses seriously. That’s how it is. As to selling my soul to the New Deal, that does not interest me now, the fear of doing that—I have been fighting and seeking punishment from an abstraction (society) and I have found the punishment in myself. (Weary am I of my sad majesty) The reactionaries have been prideful and arrogant too long, perhaps, but that is their affair. Perhaps Hal [Chase] is not dead—he knew me, and made me shudder. Sanctity is love and humility, and there is truth and self—A Great White Myth—vaster than the jungle of the unreal. I will be a lamb to “society,” I was never a jackal like Denison [Burroughs] or a lynx like Joan [Adams], though I have tried to be like everyone but moi. No?
Je Changerau. There are no intellectuals in a madhouse. The rest of the people here see more visions in one day than I do in a year—tho profound gulfs appearing everywhere. Do you know what amnesia is? If you cannot speak a name which is on the tip of your tongue, which you don’t remember—a line of poetry, or a person, etc. But what if that condition extends through greater areas than a single instance? What if you can’t pronounce what’s just beyond your mind—what if all memory is gone? The whole world new, and you familiar but unknown, even your name gone? People like this everyday here—and we speak of visions—others are lost. Nightmares are daily occurrences.
I have discovered that I have no feelings, just thoughts, borrowed thoughts taken from someone I admire because he seems to have feeling. I am tired of thoughts against the New Deal. If the New Deal can teach me to feel love for it, I will love it.
Words mean only what they say, what they state on the surface; infinity, nothingness, are literally inexistent. The only thing real is on the surface.
The bureaucrats are right—the proof is that I have spent my life fighting them. Why shouldn’t they be right, except that if we thought so it would upset our established spiritual order? Very well, upset our old order. A revolution? Why not? Do you know what it would mean to the reactionary editor if he found out all of a sudden that he had wasted his life in a quixotic meaningless war against a true reality represented by the “bureaucrats.” The lice of eternity, the pits of reality—“O bitter reward of many a tragic tomb. The murderous innocence of the sea.” O Bleak Bill. He is afraid that I will find out that he is crazy, that his analysis of me was a tragic farce—not an absurd farce, but a tragic real one—that he has led me astray. Very well—write a letter to the editor declaring that one reluctant subscriber now finds that he has, despite his parent’s warnings, been led astray—by wastrels and perverts. The scion of a noble family. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it, and make of it what you will, I am not Jesus Christ. I am Jerry Rauch.48 Mon pere avait raison. Ma mere elait fou.
Behold! the swinging Swan
Where the geese have gamboled.
Say my oops,
Beat my bone
All my eggs are scrambled.
Reality, as Claude De Maubri [Lucien Carr] well knows, is that familial and social community which we, as madmen, have discontinued. Oedipus Rex—he, he alone, caused the plague in the play.
If we were to love as intensely as we now hate, without hate’s contradictions—and love the very things we hate?
And what else would be the answer, except that it is we, not they, who are crazy? That is a foreign policy alien and vast to the local isolationist publicists. I contemplate incredible logical revolutions different from any in the past decade.
What is this seasonal madness and pride in spirit that we have cultivated but a premeditated insult to other people? A defense against their love? The attendants in the madhouse love me, they want to help me. Why should I resent them and make jokes at their expense? I laugh alone. Roll my bones, roll my bones, don’t leave my bones alone. We are all really crazy. You are crazy, too.
In sum I consider myself a sick man. Denison [Burroughs] was in a madhouse once but instead of learning something new he suspected that everybody there was trying to torture him. You too. Think of Kafka. That is the very Gate of Wrath.
You do not give me credit for sufficient abandon of spirit. I am happy, also, that Wilhelm Reich is right. He is probably more right than the rest of the analytic sc
hools. I am also happy, also, that you and I will be together in New York in years to come. I might have gone to Denver if you stayed. Now we will call each other from our penthouses to our country houses by telephone each night in 1954.
Walter Adams is back. I have not seen him yet, but I will this Saturday. He wrote me 3 lines here—saying he would like to see me. Where is your mother going to live?
And Edie [Parker Kerouac] too!
Claude I called last weekend—short phone talk. All O.K. He is going out with someone, but won’t say who over the phone. We are not going to meet again till fall.
Do you really want to finance this poor broken spirit on a trip to Paris? I will accept when the time comes if I am still crazy. Did you hear from Pomeroy [Neal Cassady]?
(Ha! How I intend to frighten Pommy someday!) I think of your stanzas the same thing that you do. Six water angels is the best, also waterharps and waterfalls, (I think all it needs is one running coherent plot to make it coherent—otherwise Arodos) (But you have that?) (water is your medium). Watery shrouds, 6 water angels sing enthroned—you are saying that it’s all bullshit, all the symbolism. Bleak Blook the same.
Your prose has many more bleak echoes than before, is all you say it is also: “The utter gravity of our investigations.” That is what I felt in Cézanne originally, and your novel which converted me, amazing how our early frivolity changes alchemically. All balloons go up. Shadow changes into bone.
We will all be together again soon, don’t worry. I personally will go get Pommy and Denison . . . when I go sane. I believe in the Great White Myth, I don’t believe in the jungle anymore, really. Down with the associative constellations! Down with the constellations! I want to be directed and commanded by “Arbitrary Reason.” Which is as much to say 1.) God, reality is not arbitrary, but necessary, because true and in existence. The jungle is a big camp, a big fake. It doesn’t exist, it’s an illusion. What exists is real, what doesn’t exist doesn’t exist, it’s nothing. De nihil de nihil. The great white myth is not cement and noisy dust, it is actually love in disguise. So far I’m the first (except Claude and perhaps Haldon [Chase]) to see this. 2.) To tell the truth I am a little doe who has just been devoured by a tiger and I don’t believe in jungles anymore; and I seek the inmost shade.