by Jack Kerouac
I have described the flaw I thought about the naturalistic side; that is to say I respect the total structure of the book but wish to estimate it clearly for you as I see it, in its particulars, also, still, despite possible horrors of criticism.
I would have to read book over again to figure out what I think is wrong with the mythological structure as it is interwoven. Mainly at the moment it seems to me almost just right. I felt it was too sketchy at first till I reached the long explanations of Dovish politics, Blook, etc. page 191—explanations so breathless and coming just at a point when I was getting so irritated with the confusion (I was cursing you—that stupid Kerouac hasn’t even bothered to shove in a plot to all the supernatural gossip—just left an undigested mass of images and references and rumors) but there you came in with a whole explanation—which by this time I couldn’t think possible to give, anyway, but now so clear it seemed like a miracle (like cleanup of detective story with clues). Thank god.
Blook isn’t as interesting as he might be—as he was in conversation, not an important creation, you fell down on old Blook—the scene where he meets child while burying an onion is not here—and rushes screaming away in fright, you could have said “up walks Ti Jean just at that moment behind the bush where bleak Blook stood timidly soliloquizing the onion grave” or some such nonsense utilizing the phrase bleak Blook. Perhaps with Sax on trip to the castle.
The conceptions are all very original and must have been hard to set down to do, though, though great delight to conceive, as they were to read. Great idea of trip to castle, great moment observing the town with Sax and boy, great Dovish and Evilist controversy—in fact I think more attention and time spent to details of the myth would be just great—it is the real caviar of the whole book—so intelligent, so apt as metaphysical and social commentary, so hip and yet so public in reference. I don’t see why you can’t do more of that and wave book greater.
Would love to talk to you—on plot.
[ . . . ]
Section of reality about the poems is confusing. Where are all the old poems you had in Diana’s apartment years ago? I think I have some. I don’t too much dig the poems, nor the seeming sloppy and foggy way you worked them into the text. Seems to me like jerry built intrusion. Should be poems (more meaningful ones, in specific context of dovish or evilist significance, or final giant-bird significance, or Sax preparation significances. But on first reading your poems seemed to be just fucking mells and mells and I said “O shit” when I saw them, I thought they were going to be really funny, but it was just a bunch of interesting lines (hodos chameliantos—chameleon imagery) with a few illuminating ones scattered here and there—the poems weren’t part of the whole conspiracy enough, just tacked in by your enthusiasm it seemed.
Have you as a child ever visited someone older (like old negro or teacher) and sat daily in their parlor among brocades listening to their transaction of life, fed cookies watching their world go on without understood significance before your innocent eyes?
So perhaps there should be an earlier meeting and rapport with Sax, with more detailed plot of the preparation shown the reader, more action and familiarity with the Dutchess, Blook, Sax. The wizard (all those great creations, you realize, have scarcely a page or two apiece—and they are the great figures of the book—devoted to their characters and daily life and humor-actions and gossips etc and anecdotes—so that I hardly know anything about Condu and the Wizard—they seem like the same persona practically, and not different identities—and Adolphus Ghoulens (does he mean to appear as the author of the document?) (just for the joke of the name?) and Amadeus Baroque—all these figures good for real fine Mozartean comedy (like the wonderful career of Boaz Jr. until it gets too confused with frozen children imagery—a little out of anachronism with focus of reality) are neglected and not given full life—you treat them as if they were just around to be mentioned and dismissed as part of the general joke, but they need further development—otherwise their full significance (which you know now only in your own head) is lost on the average reader, and that includes me too.
The apparition should be more detailed—not complexified—the plot’s complex enough, just simplified and oriented solidly. Words works, I don’t know exactly what I mean. But like, the Dutchess you see thrice, you don’t know really just what relationship all the evilists have to each other—you don’t ever see an actual dovist, just hear rumors (maybe that’s ok) of them. The gnomes and all the more complicated machinery is a little too science fiction farfetched. If you want I will send you a detailed appraisal of how much of the myth detail succeeds and how much seems to be anachronism—this is a very important point. Mainly the whole myth succeeds, it’s built like a brick shithouse as a grand symbol, some of the details (old shmecker conversations about B between the batman and the contessa) are brilliant, and on the whole most of it was polish, sophistication, intellectual suavity—all of which (intentionally) you failed to achieve in Town and City in Francis intellectual decadent sections—but here that awkwardness never everything’s real high comedy as you would like to imagine it.
At this point, to recapitulate letter, I have covered what I thought wrong (and OK) about the two wings of your bat book, the reality narrative and the myth narrative and structure.
[ . . . ]
In On the Road you failed to produce that eerie human vision of Neal mostly.
This book is an actual vision, first one in American lit since who knows?
Practically speaking—that evilists should go down with the ship, be destroyed with the snake, is a great pure pun on happenstance—it happens, like Joan A. [Adams]
Incidentally, in your great long letter you mistake me for an evilist because I am no longer a professed dovist. I am like Ti Jean, a practical boy who feels at certain moments that Dr. Sax is mad and had better be escaped from. A Fieldsian attitude too.
I have been hoping to hear from you. My father said I have a letter at home in Paterson, from Cassady, possibly reply to my postcard, but he sent it on to me but I have not received it, hoping it will not be an evil thing, hoping it will be a pipperone or at least a level crawyak.
I have not written the Shrouded Stranger. Your book poses quite a challenge. We will see about my mediocrity when and if I finish that. Till then I can only admit that since genius is 9/10 perspiration etc. I am worse than mediocre, I am a total failure. And yesterday I received a letter from Carl, counseling me to burn Empty Mirror as it was not entertaining, just a “suffering of this self-pity type is worthless.”
I am working at the same place I was when I last saw you. I saw Herb [Huncke] briefly for five minutes several days later. I don’t want to see him yet. I have a sweet little pad in Lower East side with heat and hot water, very neat and clean, your own mother wouldn’t be ashamed to live there if you know what I mean. Three small rooms, bedroom, kitchen, parlor all $33.80 a month furnished even. Anyone who wants to come visit or stay over is invited, plenty privacy.
My address is 206 East 7th Street Apt. 16 NYC (between Avenue B&C). Dusty [Moreland]’s clothes etc. are here but she is not, we’ve about broken up by now, I don’t know where she sleeps. Being sparse on details as I want to finish this letter with the necessary information.
Give me lowdown if wish on what you intend to do financially. I think I know how Sax could be published, with or without revisions (though Jack I still say listen to me when I say what I think about your writing). I will consult with Carl and Holmes (who I don’t know how they’ll be for actual agenting.)
Suggest you get MCA to handle if they accept it—doubt they will. [Bob] Burford I believe would publish as is. [New] Directions might publish revised. So also Bobbs-Merrill Louis Simpson if revised, maybe as is.
Incidentally nothing in the book strikes me as sexually verbally offensive or censurable, could all be left as is.
Watch out on progress selling T.&C. [The Town and the City] to paperback. M.C.A. should be asked to. Will write practical details
on all of above if asked. You sure shat on me last time I tried to help—
As ever love to
Allen
All in all Jack the book is a real triumph for you, a Beethovenian-Melvillian triumph just as you imagine (or don’t) imagine.
Do you want me to show it to Van Doren? He would be delighted.
I have been exploring the Lower East Side for the first time really exploring its depth and vastness that I never realized—some streets like Mexican Thieves Market.
Jack Kerouac [San Francisco, California] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]
Nov. 8 1952
Dear Allen,
I read your letter many times. It’s very nice, you are very nice to understand my writings. I felt honored. Doctor Sax is a mystery. I’m going to leave him the way he is, but not for the same reasons as On the Road (enraged, etc.) but because I really like it the way it is, a few things you suggest I will do, like bleak Blook and the child. Doctor Sax is only the top of the pot about Lowell . . . the truth buried insane in me, in my head that becomes so inflamed sometimes. I’m trying to speak to you brother to brother, like we were French Canadian brothers. Literature as you see it, using words like “verbal” and “images” etc. and things like, well all the “paraphernalia” of criticism etc. is no longer my concern, because the thing makes me say “shitty little beach in the reeds” is pre-literary, it happened to me to think that way before I learned the words the litterateurs use to describe what they’re doing. At this moment I’m writing directly from the French in my head, Doctor Sax was written high on tea without pausing to think, sometimes Bill [Burroughs] would come in the room and so the chapter ended there, one time he yelled after me with his long gray face because he could smell the smoke in the yard. You know I was mad at you, but you know it doesn’t take me long to stop, and many times I wanted to write you and say “Well, you understand, sometimes I get mad,” etc. I always thought you my little brother, my little petushka, even tho you’re Jewish, because you’re like a little Russian brother. Lucien has always said to me not to get mad at you—if I get mad, to get mad at those who try to hurt me, like himself ? Neal got mad at me, he wasn’t talking to anybody, he hung the phone on me, I got me a fine little room in Skid Row at $4 a week and I was arranging myself so well (and writing a big new novel like Town and City) that I was happy for the first time in years, and was saying to myself, “Well, Neal has always been crazy, since the day he put his head in my door at Ozone Park and was making me believe he wanted to learn to write,” quel bull shit eh what? But I was sleeping one night on the railroad, on an old ratty couch, hard asleep after three days and three nights of work and no sleep, Neal was bent over me, hung over me, laughing, “There you are buddy! Come on, now, come on, now, no words, come on, now,” so, me, I am here to try to be nice, I go along with him and move back to his house, and then CAROLYN gets mad at me, etc. Bitchy people, I hate people, I can’t stand people any more. The phone just called me gotta go to work again, I’m sick and tired of it—This is why it took me so long to answer you, the railroad.
Let’s let John Holmes handle Doctor Sax, another thing about your letter, and you, always afraid it isn’t “right,” etc. like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Adlai Stevenson and the Harvard Law School and United Nations and Dean Acheson ready to fly at any instant with a detailed appraisal of something . . . for what? for what? for what? for what?
See?
GO is alright when you see it between book covers, it’s sincere, each page . . . Truman Capote, Jean Stafford are full of bull on every page . . . so Holmes is better than they I say.
Ah I’d love to see you, maybe I will this Xmas according to my plans of travel. Good Morning to the whole gang.
Your friend
Jack
P.S. When you said to yourself “Oh that stupid Kerouac hasn’t bothered to put in a plot, just left an undigested mass of images and references etc.” you weren’t remembering were you that once it was LOVE animated our poesies, not no anxious techniques. Yes the digging by you of Balzacian jewelpoint (and ah I can’t) it means you REALLY did comprehend the book like I thought nobody could, our clairvoyance is together—my good boy.
1953
Editors’ Note: Kerouac spent much of the winter working on the railroad in California, while Ginsberg in New York worked to find publishers for the books of his friends. In order to publicize Burroughs’s first book, Junkie, which Carl Solomon was helping to publish through his uncle’s company, Ace Books, Allen asked that Jack allow his name to be used in the publicity. On the top of the following letter, Kerouac later wrote “Cause of Tiff. ”
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [San Francisco, California]
February 19, 1953
Thursday Night 10:30
“JOHN KEROUAC AND Clellon Holmes, both experts on the Beat Generation, Holmes though his recent Times Magazine section controversy, say that they “dig” the pseudonymous William Lee as one of the key figures of the Beat Generation.
“Lee first appeared lurking in the shadows of both of their books, respectively The Town and the City and Go, portrayed as an underground character. Lee’s professional debut in the open on his own as an author is announced by Ace Double Books with the publication of Junkey: The Confessions of an Unredeemed Junk Addict, which comes up from underground April 15.
“Author-Junky Lee has not stayed around to gather whatever plaudits are due and was last heard from on an expedition into the Amazon basin in search of a rare narcotic.”
Dear Jack:
On the reverse is rough draft [text in quote marks above] of news gossip item for the Times that Carl [Solomon] and I and Wyn publicity figured up. I read it to Holmes and it’s OK by him. Will be given to Times gossip litterateur, David Dempsey.
Please give your permission for your name to be used, and also please send me, for now or later use, with this item, a two sentence plug for Bill [Burroughs] as intense and hi-class as you can make it. Twenty-five words or so. Holmes will contribute also—emphasizing literary value, whatever it is, personality, or perhaps balloonish foolishness of whole project of JUNK.
I am expecting to go out of town this weekend to Paterson on Saturday tho I may be here Friday nite.
John never made it last week to Birdland in time anyway, he came in from Queens, or wherever, half hour late and thought perhaps it was his own fault.
I will call Lu [Lucien Carr] tonight and move into his apt. in a few days perhaps Monday or Tuesday. He’ll go away for a month so perhaps we could see him again once before.
Adios. Write that please and send me this week. For dear Will [Burroughs]’s sake.
Yours
Allen
Editors’ Note: Kerouac responded immediately using his mother’s New York City address, his “official” residence, since he saw this as an important business matter.
Jack Kerouac [Richmond Hill, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York]
Feb. 21, 1953
Dear Allen and Sirs:
I do not give my permission for my name to be used in the notes prepared by you and A.A. Wyn and Carl Solomon for David Dempsey’s New York Times literary notes column. I do not want my real name used in conjunction with habit forming drugs while a pseudonym conceals the real name of the author thus protecting him from prosecution but not myself and moreover whose work at the expense of my name is being bruited for book trade reasons.
In this “rough draft publicity” I do not want The Town and the City mentioned in juxtaposition to Go, by association hinting at some professional and artistic semblance, and I deny permission to place my name next to Clellon Holmes as a co-expert on the Beat Generation.
Especially I do not want to be misquoted as saying that I “dig the pseudonymous William Lee as one of the key figures of the Beat Generation.” My remarks on the subject of either the pseudonymous author William Lee or the generation are at your disposal
through the proper channels, from my pen and through my agent.
Yours most respectfully and strictly business,
John Kerouac
Editors’ Note: Ginsberg responded with a large dose of sarcasm.
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [San Francisco, California]
February 24, 1953
Mr. Jack Kerouac
94-21 134 Street
Richmond Hill, New York
Dear Sir:
Thank you for your two prompt replies of the 21st to my letter of the 20th.87 I am sincerely aggrieved that my original appeal appeared to violate certain proprieties of your situation which you explained in your letters, and I hasten to set this matter right on all counts.
Before I proceed let me congratulate you on the charm and incisiveness of the quotation which you authorize; which quotation I will naturally submit to your agent for his (her) approval before making use (there)of.
There are two delicate matters which I wish to mention: While I approve your wish to dissociate your own literary position with that of the author of Go (who incidentally gave his general permission, etc. without consulting MCA) and while I will do everything in my power to aid you in doing so, especially in this instance, it behooves me to remind you as a friend that, adopting your suggestion of separate statements, no further reference will be made by me to anyone that it was at your request. In other words, let us do this as quietly as possible, so as not to risk offending Mr. Holmes. If you wish to make a public matter of this, of course, that is your privilege, and I will follow suit.