by Jack Kerouac
I know you are honest but I never realized how sincere you are. Your book continues and concludes with final sincere self-statements (not horrible revelations but peaceful) that exhaust possibility—the real thing, if I may use a Huncke and turn a maudlin phrase.
I wish we could show our true face more often. I don’t want to say any more because you know how I feel. I don’t want to be rhetorical (though through images I may summon up a Flash of the Shepherd). I hate to short change you by losing sight of you in an abstract ecstasy of our funeral or whatever life is. [Sentence washed out by water.] Just the same I hate to lose the opportunity to pitch a little woo.
As a result of your book I was able to see Neal more closely today and we were more than gravely polite to each other tonight and I brought Varda up to Diana’s for an hour for him to meet.
Isn’t everything really complete, though?
Well, Zagg,57 I guess I’ll close now because I have to go to bed.
I am going if possible to see Schapiro sometime Thursday afternoon; and then to Neal’s lot that night to show him the paintings. Get in touch with me somehow this week so I can call you up and tell you what exact arrangements have been made for Meyer Schapiro—through Holmes? C. Solomon is going away for a week.
Also I expect to see Lenrow (to return a book and perhaps have supper) Friday afternoon, if you would enjoy seeing him then call him.
I would like to write prose and may soon. Still afraid of work, but might also write a longer “Shroudy Stranger” poem with embalmess and ecstasy of unreals and corruption, visions of the Booder [Buddha], ghost tidings, window’s aglory, pigs asses, dungeons of the lamb, dark shaggy things of the sea, the monstrous lights of the Sahara, and tears out of my Hebrew face and gas.
O Tears out of my Hebrew face.
Allen
P.S. Also your poem is comprehensible now.
I was jealous of Neal’s blood-brotherhood.
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]
Paterson February 24, ’49 [sic: 1950]
Mon Cher ami Jean:
Because I left the hospital today and carried my belongings directly to Paterson, I will not see you this week, and so am writing.
I received a letter from Giroux sent Feb. 17. He tried unsuccessfully to peddle my poems, and said that he went out of his way to do it because he liked them. He does not think the book is publishable yet, and in addition thinks that my private idiom needs a channel to the public through magazines first; and suggests prose, which he will look at, to make a name first. Half page letter, concluding with presentation of Saroyan’s Assyrian,58 signed Bob. I went to the office and picked up my material, and also stole a copy of Cocktail Party [by T. S. Eliot] (the world owes me at least that $3 worth of heart balm). He also suggested I try Poetry magazine (now edited by one Karl Schapiro). I saw Van Doren briefly, told him the results, said I would try Poetry (once again, as they rejected poems this year already), and asked him to intercede with Partisan. It seems so far that I have not been able to make any magazine, which is not right. I will be surprised if I can’t place anything at all that way in the next year at least. I do not know if this situation has anything to do with the lack of drive I have to work. But no more complaints, I don’t find that publishing has the same glory that it once had when I wanted to be supreme.
I am in Paterson and I move into the house tomorrow. As soon as I am settled and the weather looks to be warm, come out. I will be in N.Y. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday morning for the next months to see my doctor. I can see you around 1:30 Thursday anywhere. Send postcard to my new address which is 416 East 34 Street, Paterson.
A turning point has been reached in that I am not going to have anymore homosexual affairs anymore: my will is free enough now to put this in writing as a final statement.
Verne [Neal Cassady] seems a little pathetic and dizzy from time to time as I visit him at Diana’s. I had to get back home one night this week, and he refused to say goodbye or understand that I wanted to go but kept on reading me passages and pages of Hindus-Céline59 past my pumpkin hour; and then when I forced the issue by interrupting him to apologize and say goodbye he accused me (jokingly) of wasting time. (Time, he meant by that, I should be out the door instead of explaining that I was sorry that I had to interrupt) Ah. But the monomaniacal, almost purposeful (on purpose) way in which, though he knew I had to go by the minute, he just kept reading to me, irritated me. Sheer perversion. He was trying to formulate some tender communion other than this attritive imposition; that is his trouble. He doesn’t know what he is doing. I am annoyed by his insistence that he does: he thinks so because he has built a wall of mental plans. You can hardly get a word or a look in edgewise, the way he juggles Time to keep it from settling. I know this because I know from feeling-sight, as well as from the fact that when he is cool or not on edge, on some good days, he is altogether different. But there is so much invisible burden of the past on his mind that he seldom can escape. Verne is very young in spirit.
I will not speak of my creative plans (which are beginning to bud again). I am going to write non-metrical poetry for a while, I think. I have learned enough about surface. Is The Gates Of Wrath a good short novel title? Or is it like Steinbeck?
Do you find me distant or frigid of sentiment lately? I’m not, I assure you, Jean. Not toward Verne, either.
The American myth of Wolfe and power and pathos is changing in this decade. What is happening I realized this week, reading Wolfe’s credo, is that we are nearer to the edge of inevitable social transformation that are going to affect us in thought and sense: for one thing, do you realize how much nearer the alignment of east against west has become, especially since English sway in elections? If we could carry this off, it were different; but I feel in my bones that we are not really the world-spirit-power, but that Russia is actually stronger, militarily already, potentially more overwhelming, perhaps even in her myths now, and I think that Wolfe’s “lost” America may be reduced to the pathetic status of self-deception. We are used to thinking of ourselves in sophisticated life and fortune power thoughts, but it may actually be that we are swollen with pitiful pride and history will bypass us (even me and you) in the next half century. We will become a sort of greater Spain, or Portugal. Dig? And not merely Life magazine myth, that is just the false formal consciousness of America—but pioneer America will not have the significance that it once had. Did you see the subway ads for Texas, Li’l Darling?60 It looks like a decadent capitalist satire in crude form out of Russian propaganda magazine, satirizing chauvinistic Americans machine enthusiasms. Nobody here is (Paterson) aware that anything might happen—depression, war—to shake up the U.S. again from top to bottom. Nobody knows seriousness outside of self.
These are random thoughts of the moment. Don’t know if they mean anything. Might however be prophecy about real time.
400,000 unemployed in N.Y. on relief.
Stepmother thinks your book (half read) is much better than most novels.
Ton ami.
Allen of Paterson
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]
ca. March 1950
Dear Jack:
Missed you last Thursday. How was Lowell? Well, it is now arranged that you make your literary debut (in the little mag. that is) in Neurotica in the same issue as me. I went down on my knees (practically: took me days to recover from the fury) to Landesman61 to get him to publish “Pull My Daisy.” He finally agreed but I had to chop the poem down to half its size so he could squeeze it in; it still looks good. I did that on the basis of my service to him by recommending [Carl] Solomon to his attention. I ran back and forth and Carl turned out a great hip-cool essay on insulin and madness and hospital and sanity.62 Landesman and [John Clellon] Holmes read it and agree its probably the best article they ever printed. It too will be with our issue. Make sure, incidentally, that
you do give them your work, so that everything will not be anticlimactic in my eyes. I was so pleased by Carl’s success (Landesman, college Joe himself, thinks that Carl is a great new discovery) that I ran to Neal and started him off on an article on car stealing, hoping that some small achievement of his might give everybody a shot in the arm; also for sentiment. Well, he was pleased like little boy (his better nature) at so much responsibility. I make it a point to cut in at 75 St.63 early Monday and Thursday morning (8:30) for two hours before going uptown to my Doc.
Also last Thursday I had lunch with poetry editor of New Yorker [Howard Moss]. I sent him poems which he passed on to chiefs but they rejected them on three different occasions. He will look at my book and see if he can find anything they can use. Probably will be able to find something. He also invited me to a party at his house next Thursday (this Thursday) at 11 at nite: young poets who are speaking at a YMHA poetry series, in their honor. He will also introduce me to Dylan Thomas in two weeks. I think if I get around and meet people I may be able to get poems published. Lucien will come to party with Barbara [Hale]; you come too, if you can.
I saw Lu [Lucien Carr] last night. We agreed that your book [The Town and the City] had no advertisement and this was a serious situation. Suggest you talk to somebody at Harcourt and if this fails wire Giroux explaining situation and asking what’s up. It doesn’t seem natural for there to be so little advertising, at such a crucial time, and it may make a tremendous difference. T&C could sink into obscurity if they don’t make a lot of noise. This may sound like old wives gossip but my original optimistic prognosis, reinforced in my mind by reviews, is being rapidly undermined in my own mind by fears about some commercial slipup unforeseen brought on by Harcourt. Do something. Man the lifeboats. Get Rome on the phone. You have a duty to protect your investments. Don’t hesitate. Time is crucial. I am serious. Why is that stinking company advertising nothing in the Sunday papers but Merton? This can ruin everything.
You will he happy to hear that Lucien (himself) said that L.M. Jones’s review in the magazine was a lot of “obvious” literary bullshit. Remember, Lucien is a realist. I write this down because I was taken aback by it myself, as I guess you were.
Don’t have a mind of my own. Do you?
I see you as a slob, too, in the same way that I see myself as a self-conscious wreck (at the Paterson party), and, as I understand Claude [Lucien Carr], himself, actually sees himself. Trouble with Neal is that he won’t admit that he is just a slob to himself. The slob is the truth (not the whole, but a major aspect of the true truth) and it is on this humility that we are true to life. As you spoke of yourself in the Damnation of Pokipsie [Poughkeepsie], 27 years old and alone, fat bellied, that is how I see you. You should look around seriously as you propose to find someone who’ll love you for yourself alone, and not your golden hair, and who’ll you’ll seriously respect in family humility. I am slowly finding that the only future. I look to Carl, in my imagination, as a kind of teacher in this respect. Carl says “The world is a wonderful place,” on the phone this morning: he woke me up to read me a poem called “Thank you, Sir” and quoted me a line of Melville’s “The yearning voids recoil, for terrible is earth.” Terrible here meaning awesome; the void-gone-yearning is afraid of the family density of life.
I told Neal to go to the hospital.
I feel the approach of a permanent spring fever. The best spring fever is that which seeks love and warmth, and is without ideas or fever or nerves, and spends sunny Sunday walking in the park and realizing how peaceful life is.
I am glad that Fitzgerald64 likes me, in any phase, and that he digs me as Levinsky. I will write him a note (fifty pages) the first spring day.
Carl said that I should lay down the law to Neal when he tries to get me into a witch dance. He said: “Neal has to come down. Neal has to come down. Neal has to come down.”
Your suggestions about my writing usually set me off inanimately for hours. (mass-observation note) [ . . . ]
Henceforth let’s enjoy life. No more suffering, no more woe. I hope this letter finds you in a merry mood.
Your buddy,
Allen of Paterson
Editors’ Note: Ginsberg’s stay in the mental hospital led him to believe that he could cure his own homosexuality if he wanted to. For this reason he tried to find women sexually attractive and finally he lost his virginity with a woman that summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as he described in this letter to Kerouac, who was visiting Burroughs in Mexico.
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac [Mexico City, Mexico]
Saturday Night, July 8, 1950
Dearest Jack:
If you are in any ennui or doldrums, lift up your heart, there IS something new under the sun. I have started into a new season, choosing women as my theme. I love Helen Parker, and she loves me, as far as the feeble efforts to understanding of three days spent with her in Provincetown can discover. Many of my fears and imaginations and dun rags fell from me after the first night I slept with her, when we understood that we wanted each other and began a love affair, with all the trimmings of Eros and memory and nearly impossible transportation problems.
She is very great, every way—at last, a beautiful, intelligent woman who has been around and bears the scars of every type of knowledge and yet struggles with the serpent knowing full well the loneliness of being left with the apple of knowledge and the snake only. We talk and talk, I entertain her in grand manner with my best groomed Hungarian manner, and I play Levinsky-on-thetrollycar, or mad hipster with cosmic vibrations, and then, O wonder, I am like myself, and we talk on seriously and intimately without irony about all sorts of subjects, from the most obscure metaphysical through a gamut to the natural self; then we screw, and I am all man and full of love, and then we smoke and talk some more, and sleep, and get up and eat, etc.
The first days after I lost my cherry—does everybody feel like that? I wandered around in the most benign and courteous stupor of delight at the perfection of nature; I felt the ease and relief of knowledge that all the maddening walls of Heaven were finally down, that all my olden aking corridors were traveled out of, that all my queerness was a camp, unnecessary, morbid, so lacking in completion and sharing of love as to be almost as bad as impotence and celibacy, which it practically was, anyway. And the fantasies I began having about all sorts of girls, for the first time freely and with the knowledge that they were satisfiable.
Ah, Jack, I always said that I would be a great lover some day. I am, I am at last. My lady is so fine that none compare. And how can she resist me? I’m old, I’m full of love, when I’m aroused I’m like a veritable bull of tenderness; I have no pride of heart, I know all about all worlds, I’m poetic, I’m antipoetic, I’m a labor leader, I’m a madman, I’m a man, I’m a man, I’ve got a cock. And I have no illusions, and like a virgin I have all of them, I’m wise, I’m simple. And she, she’s a great old woman with a beautiful face and a perfect fair body that everybody in the neighborhood calls a whore. She’s so sharp, and she never makes me shudder. She don’t want war, she wants love.
Apparently I have quite respectable precedents—she was engaged to Dos Passos for over a year, he took her and kids to Cuba then, she lunched with Hemingway, knows all kinds of literary people. She was also engaged awhile and helped midwife Thomas Heggen with Mister Roberts; he later suicided. (he-he!) But none, she says, compare to me. That’s what a woman is for, to make you feel good, and vice-versa.
Then, her children, they are the most knocked out pair of flaming red haired, angelic, wise young boys (age 5 and 10) I ever saw. They need a father, which alas (this is the crux of practical problems) I am sure I cannot be, for financial and other unhappy reasons, such as not wanting to get stuck permanently with the situation. So we talk about this too.
I am in Paterson—I still work, so can’t see her much, though I pine. She offered to set me up with her in Cape Cod, she working, I staying home writing
and caring for kids, but I can’t see it as I still see doctor and want to get in a position of being financially stable somehow (though at the moment I am so beat for money I am a dog). Then to Key West for winter, if I want. Ug, so much joy!
Hal Chase sure picked himself a screwy cold chick.
Tell Joan [Burroughs] that my fair damsel originally reminded me of her, and much of their personal inborn style is alike. You must also tell me what weary, skeptical comments Bill comes on with.
I only wish you were here to talk to. Lucien is so much himself—he patted me on the back mockingly, kept buying me drinks at 4 AM the night I got back in town, asking me sardonic lascivious and practical questions, declaring that he didn’t believe a word I said.
By god, I’ve been canorked with a feather!
Neal rearrived here 2 weeks ago, his car broke down in Texas so he planed back. He and Diana [Hansen] are having trouble between them, partly over practical plans—at this point he’s acting slightly gruff and mean, and she weeps; he’s also kind of shuddery and nervous. I would be if I were him. He never should have let her have a baby—they were doing ok till she began to try capturing him with authority and ritual, and the baby was or became a kind of trick, which he let pass ambiguously; now its marriage, they were in Newark the other day (with [John Clellon] Holmes and [Alan] Harrington) to get a license. Now he is restive, lost his job, had a call from the Frisco railroad, and is going back west in a few days. He promises to write, he will save money, he will be back when he’s laid off; but she, that foolish girl, is beginning to see that she is stuck with the fruit of her too-greedy lust for him; and in the long run I believe she’s fucked herself up, and him too, somewhat, by disturbing the balance they had before. She knew what she was getting into, but it was not only serious love, it was a kind of soupy insistence born of jealousy and vanity, that made her assume she would succeed in “fixing” him up.