by Jack Kerouac
Kells is a wonderful guy, made me mad as hell when he said he needed to go to a psychiatrist . . . the psychiatrist said “You need therapy immediately” so naturally Kells goes around borrowing huge sums, a la Burroughssian flair, and here I am raging at him to go down the public library and take out Buddha for god’s sake. How silly. “At once” indeed, these conmen . . . as Bill would say, such impudence.
At your request, I pondered and remembered your 1948 Harlem visions, and they were the granddaddy of em all . . . accurate too . . . prophetic of Buddha. I would say you are a Sage, an elephant among Kings, a veritable Ananda among men, you have more naturals in you than Old Bull Balloon . . . Strange to say, tho, I see you very clearly now as more a Chinese type sage, a Taoist, a Chuangtse, than a Buddhist . . . I am now reading Tao over again carefully; Chuangtse especially, who is absolutely brilliant; I find Indian Buddhism almost impossible to practice; Tao is a more elastic, more humane philosophy whereas Buddhism is an ascetic way of life tacked on to a philosophy . . . ascetism and yogism are hard on a big boned fella like me, sensual wine lover, woman lover like me . . . bum like me . . . I think I’ll become a wandering Taoist Bum . . . wanta come?
Allen, your visions of Harlem, your Leviathan, your reality opening itself a moment to reveal itself, your sudden recognition of ancient anguish and coyness on the faces of people on the sidewalk, your eerie discovery of the Idea behind objects instead of the apparent objects themselves, all smacks of clairvoyance
P.S. Don’t forget to dig Frisco negro jazz with Neal in Nash—Loud!!
Allen Ginsberg [San Jose, California] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]
ca. early August 1954
Dear Jack:
I keep thinking of writing you, since I sent last letter did you [receive] it? Sent to Richmond [Hill]. The duke doth not answer. Oh yet yes, I was to add a longer note in time later. The main problem, is, I want to send on a lot of poetry, to a sure destination, and it is not at all finished. Things go slowly. I put long poems aside for future endings. I read in basic prosody seeking for the yellow springs (of Chinese death) and conceive images, blasphemous and sensual “hidden in skin” and the airiest most abstract hymns to blue love, or green love or whatever, grasping stray vultures and hawks from the cages of heaven in this wooden house where I dwell in the prison of my life as thou dids’t here too then untimely once or twice overing, or thrice was it?
There’s too many poems to finish and not one really done, all these fragments small and large. And the possibility now after Indo China and Ike’s admission that U.S. containment policy would be replaced by a weaker more limited policy of cold war—are we losing? Is the Fall of America already upon us? The Great Fall we once prophesied. I wrote my brother “and it will be horrible to see, broken machinery and cracked pavement I mean.” My god all hell will break loose here when Asia begins fucking us, so the possibility of a prophetic poem, using ideas of politics and war and calling on love and reality for salvation, etc. Imagine throwing in Cayce ideas no—too complicated. What by the way do you think of rebirth? Is it also a Buddha Buddy Bhud Boo Oom sh-bam, idea? Have you heard “Life Could Be Dreamy” by that popular swinging group of spades, (and their imitators) I forgot. It has a ding a ling or ling a ling dining car harmony bob sonority. Also a canzon: “There’s a riot going on (in Cell No. 9) / The scarface jones / come up and said / it’s too late now / cause the fuse is lit / There’s a riot going on (chorus)”
I am still not working, waiting to hear my fate at the railroad. I flunked the physical with that old evil mysterious (anti-Semitic?) Dr. STRANGE of the SP [Southern Pacific]; appealing speedily to Dr. Washburne head of SP Hospital Medicine he sustained me and accepted me. Now waiting in second week for verification of my victory or bureaucratic victimage. I tried for brakeman, no jobs, got OK’d by yardmaster for yard clerk. Waiting. Even if I make it business may be slow. But nonetheless trying to make it.
[ . . . ]
In Frisco I spent much time with Sublette and friend Vic, describe another time, big ex-army actor cat seaman a man and right hearted we drank wine in room for days. And walk a bit by the pool hall. Ed Roberts too, twice, another unidentified Gene, solomonesque, Neal once, other dark men. I also visited Kenneth Rexroth a poet who had read and dug Junkie on his own who conversed with me till 11 and drove me downtown for late train and is reader for New Directions—we must approach him with your work. Did Directions reject? What has happened there in the end, huh? We may be able to do something, maybe not. Anyway he’ll read anything given him and is an old friend and worker of [James] Laughlin. Also a very easy guy ex hip about forty-five, speaks Greek, and Latin, Chink, Jap, etc. and is an anarchist and bleeding heart art martyr he says Kenneth Patchen he likes the most, and writes poem for all the dead great minor and major poets he’s known that died too young or miserable lived or died. But very good, he likes to make believe he’s tough and don’t give shit and in a revolution against society and he does add to its small literature in a nice way. I mean he ain’t Pound but one of the older disciples though he’s independent etc. etc. all this crap. Big library, married, children, lives cheap as man of letters, knows everybody young and old subterranean or interested. Likes [Bill] Keck, respects his dignity that is. I told him something about you, Bill [Burroughs].
So as yet won’t send poems. Maybe wait till you get here or till finished really. All I could send you is small and like my old style: but the longer more historic not done.
Bill writes still, he will be here at my invitation etc. September or later. Date not set, he’ll visit family first. What are your plans? I really hope I’m working then because if so I hope to really have some kind of enjoyable life, not just an old mad city of fusty employed. Want to dig museums and movies and Yosemites, study, write, talk. And love? Well that comes from heaven I guess, or nowhere.
Love from paradise,
Allen
[ . . . ]
Also I have not said anything about the household, well here it is, Neal plays chess. I come 10,000 miles and he sits and plays chess with the neighbor and I baby-sit and goof, Carolyn out tonight for instance. Neal now back next doors where Dick Wood baby-sits for his wife, and, before, he stuck his nose in the chess book to read and could hardly be roused to a civil word. He wakes every few days or a week for surprise conjunctions—all too rarely with any pathos or feeling—of the bodies, but heaven refuses to fall and there is the usual discord between him and Carolyn, so bitter his behavior so long suffering, or abusive, or angry—never openly hurt. She’s hurt. But she can be shrewish. Does she really love? I thought so. We were familiar awhile, and there is some coldness, now, though we patch up and are polite and sometimes involved in interesting conversation. Sometimes my mind drifts. Often I can’t get across an idea, a new idea, an objective one, poetic. Political, religious, we nearly came to blows over what your nothing means nothing means. But Neal is a loss! what contradictions of character. What compulsive shuffling of cards sex cards. And the handkerchief. Tales of Watsonville, SF, uttered guiltily with eye out for wife secrecy. The mad chess. He won’t talk to me. He hides in chess, he perfects his game. The time he’s studying it now expertising WC Fields, “Tell Jack? Why . . . tell him I’ll beat his lard ass in a chess game!” So the silence in the house I read and write. I bring out a poem and force it on him or her. He expresses like in the most general terms, won’t hardly ever talk art or nothing . . . except Cayce that gets him in a good mood . . . a gleam in his eye . . . I express a doubt a heresy, he gets mad “at me! the poor fool (madman) He is not a man!” (Rimbaud) But the hopelessness of it, he won’t be soft. His concerns are, if there, hidden except for flashes that you can’t trust, they’re so sudden and offhand, the really personal things. It’s cold and bitter when we make it too. Well . . . I will I hope soon be working. Other here, perhaps I’ll geta pad nearby. I have what to do, to keep me busy. But it’s a sham. I feel strange. Today I have a cold, caught from Hinkle’s
kids.
“. . . In a silence of facts to die?” Oh Jack, he’s losing time, sweet earthly time. Is he waiting? Is he waiting—I mean for anything or life that was promised? He won’t write because he wants to write sex and it’s a Cayce sin. She agrees. But he won’t write anything else right now. Says he’s quit. He’s quit. What? Why!? What future?? What will he do, what can he do? Trapped in R.R. etc. He doesn’t want to leave here either really. This is the best deal. Why am I here? I hardly know.
But you come out too. We’ll, we’ll do something. Bill will be O.K. and write. I will make it.
Neal’s basic grace is crowned
and uncorruptable but ask
such a life and waste
of sweetness.
Love
Allen
I’m afraid to say too much here—this is strictly for you not the public if any.
Jack Kerouac [Richmond Hill, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [San Jose, California]
August 23 ’54
Dear Allen,
Dedicating this joint to you as I start. Have a list of notes made from reading your letter and shall follow it as is writ. “Life Could Be a Dream,” yes I dug that tune and the singers of it and it was a little Angel of Africa turned me on it, Bob Young by name, he’s got close cropped (no) hair and black face and lisps and wanted me to go to his pad etc. but just bought me drinks on Bleecker Tavern and said really strange and mystical things about that tune, too, like you . . . I told him life IS a dream, he said no only if you lived with me . . . you might meet him someday if you want.
As for anti-Semitism on the SP, yes, the Okies on that railroad are anti-Semites, whatever that means in California.
Al Hink [Hinkle] you shouldn’t encourage on his really simple-minded and ignorant commie kick, you shouldn’t be such a fool Burroughsian liberal saying he really represents good old American dissent—“traditional American dissent” you called it, we don’t call 18th Century Toryism, siding with the national military enemy, a “healthy dissent,” it’s really treason against the government and the army, what else? Let Al go to Russia if he can git there. Thomas Paine was not a Tory. [ . . . ]
I got Cowley talkin for me now—Arabelle Porter of New World Writing just bought Jazz Excerpts (of Neal and I digging Folsom St. Little Harlem, Jackson’s Nook, and Anita O’Days nightclub on North Clark St. in Chi) (with things from Vision of Neal sneaked in, like “Lester is like the river, it starts in near Butte Montana at a place call’d Three Forks, comes balling down etc. etc.) (you know, one of the top passages of Visions of Neal, which at last can see light in print in New World within a year)—It was Cowley helped me, so I wrote and thank’d Cowley, and he wrote back and said “Maybe a publisher will take On the Road now” and he said “Show Arabelle Porter the chapter now about the Mexican girl in San Joaquin valley in the cotton tent”—So maybe you don’t have to show me to Rexroth but I don’t wanta get hungup on mail, is it because I’m lazy? or canny?) (and why should I be canny, I’m not a businessman)—I changed the title to Beat Generation of On the Road, hoping to sell it, and also I see “beatitude” in “beat” now than ever before, which might make it an international word understood in French, Spanish, most romance langues, just think of “be-at”—“be-at-itude”—and “beat” belongs to me as far I can see—(for use as title of book)—Little Shit Littlebrown Seymour Lawrence had all the half of 1954 and kept telling my agent it looked very good and finally it was rejected they say by one editor of LB altho accepted by twelve people elsewhere (on Atlantic Monthly board for some reason of merger) and to top it little shit Seymour writes me another, yet still another, severe note about “Craft” (the first one having come from rejection of Death of the Father George Martin, which everybody knows is a masterpiece and a classic chapter)—the nerve of that little queen. I tell you I get so mad-a-a-a-d! Am I good enuf though for good old soul goodman Malcolm Cowley to champion me?—Oh yes ps.s.s. I got $120 for the story, imagine. That’s my first pay since 1950. No since 1953. Well Viking can still take it if they want it and make their $250 strait, and same with Wyn.
[ . . . ]
Maybe we should write no more letters but have absolute trust in each other till we meet. He who knows does not speak.
Incidentally I’ve lost my taste for booze, and don’t hardly drink no more. You’ll see. It’s merely a matter of my taste changing again. Like no-smoke. Forc’d to it . . . I’m too old, I’m 33, to stay up all night drinking . . .
Love for you in Coast? Find a nice MG girl on Russian Hill, make it with the yacthing set, yatching set, Buddha boy . . . if you can, it’s best for you . . . I can see you in hornrimmed glasses, bermuda shorts, and camera around shoulder at Yosemite. The queers of Remo [bar] as you know are in the Black Cat there, on Columbus at Montgomery.
[ . . . ]
I’m waiting till I see you again cause I’m not coming to California by a long shot, if anything I’m going nowhere . . . I have a little plan but my plans are always so poor . . . but I’ll try it, tell you later . . . I hope to see Bill tho, he’ll surely stop in New York. Maybe you and Bill should get yourselves a house in Mexico City, only cost $200 or $300 down and you have six or seven rooms and big teas at which Paul Bowles is not invited, and start your publishing house in an empty room upstairs. Both of you work and save for this, in Calif. Bill could work in a cannery maybe, hor hor hor.
What a magnificent letter I just got from him, one sentence says “He (Paul Bowles Hobbes) invites the dreariest queens in Tangiers to tea, but has never invited me, which, seeing how small the town is, amounts to a deliberate affront”—
and
“I can’t help but feeling that you are going too far with your absolute chastity. Besides, mast’ion [masturbation] is not chastity, it is just a way of sidestepping the issue without even approaching the solution. Remember, Jack, I studied and practiced Buddhism in my usual sloppy way to be sure. The conclusion I arrived at, and I make no claims to speak from a state of enlightenment, but merely to have attempted the journey, as always, with inadequate equipment and knowledge,—like one of my South American expeditions, falling into every possible accident and error, losing my gear and my way, shivering in the cosmic winds on a bare mountain slope above life line, chilled to the blood-making marrow with final despair of aloneness: What am I doing here a broken eccentric? a Bowery Evangelist, reading books on Theosophy in the public library, (An old tin trunk full of notes in my cold water, East Side flat) imagining myself a Secret World Controller in Telepathic Contact with Tibetan Adepts?—Could he ever see the merciless, cold, facts on some winter night sitting in the operation room white glare of a cafeteria—NO SMOKING PLEASE”—(You can’t say nothin but trash, blues nigger new york song locally)—(me)—Bill:—“NO SMOKING PLEASE—See the facts and himself, an old man with the wasted years behind, and what ahead having seen The Facts? A trunk full of notes to dump in a Henry Street lot? . . . so my conclusion was that Buddhism is only for the West to study as history, that it is a subject for under standing, and Yoga, can profitably be practiced to that end. But it is not, for the West, An Answer, not A Solution. WE must learn by acting, experiencing, and living, that is, above all by Love and by Suffering. A man who uses Buddhism or any other instrument to remove love from his being in order to avoid suffering, has committed, in my mind, a sacrilege comparable to castration.” (ya can’t castrate tathagatas) (castrate the uncastratable? the invisible love?) (visible enuf when you open your eyes and look) (izzasso?) (I have my own doubts, you see, I make these little jokes) “You were given the power to love, in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.” (wow) “Buddhism, frequently amounts to a form of psychic junk . . . I may add that I have seen nothing from those California Vedantists but a lot of horse shit, and I denounce them without cavil, as a pack of frauds.” “Convinced of their own line to be sure, thereby adding self deception to their other failings. In short a sorry bunch of psychic retreaters from the dubious human journ
ey. Because if there is one thing I feel sure of it is this: that human life has direction.”
But I dear Allen say, no direction in the void.
Also Bill says, for choice prose see this, “KiKi is slowly denuding me of my clothes. He enjoys them so much and I care so little.” Talk about DeCharlus!100
Okay, Allen, goodbye.
Jean-Louis
Extra p.s. Cowley says he mentions me twice in last chapter of his new book in October.
And incidentally p.s. I changed my writing name to Jean-Louis.
JAZZ EXCERPTS by JEAN-LOUIS Remember Incogniteau?
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]
September 5, 1954
Sept. 5—Sunday 10:30 PM
554 Broadway, Room 3
Hotel Marconi, S.F. Cal.
Cher Jean-Louis Le Brie:
Thank you for your letters, all so kind, all so sweet to get, such a pleasure that tho it’s a waste of time etc. I get more kicks from reading them than almost anything else,—but don’t write if not so set up, natch. Hard to write with burn-blister on thumb (of pen hand) and no typewriter. Well: what has happened out here. [ . . . ] Carolyn caught me and Neal—screamed,—she is I think a charnel—yelled,—reversed her original hypocrisy—was it?—or I shouldn’t maybe judge—but it was not comic, the intensity of insult and horror and even I think spite, indignation, etc. (She burst into my room one 4 AM at the house) (though you see I was hiding nothing—told her in fact—it was O.K.’d—but all the details are not for here can’t write fast enough) but anyway a horrible scene—ordered me gone—Neal went blank, ran out to work—I sat and faced her. She talked and I thought her face waxed green with evil. “You’ve always been in my way ever since Denver—your letters have always been an insult—you’re trying to come between us” and more, horrible—such force, Celinish, I went cold with horror—felt steeped in evil. They hate each other, charnels to each other she and Neal. But I can’t picture it to you as I really see it, no Levinsky sacerdotal-ism involved. I was glad to get away. So took twenty dollars and went up to Frisco to the above address—(I had said nothing back to her—went blank with a kind of hopeless feeling she was mad—though tried to hold with some kind of in-sad sight to it all—I didn’t come to screw her up) and here moved into [Al] Sublette’s hotel (he moved to the Marconi up a few blocks Broadway can see Vesuvios from his window) and pounded pavements madly. Got a job in market research, $55 a week, 9-5 next month—on Montgomery financial street—found a girl the first night—a great new girl who digs me, I dig—twenty-two, young, hip (ex-singer big buddy of [Dave] Brubeck, knows all the colored cats, ex-hipster girl) pretty in a real chic classy way, straight—she works in high teacup emporium store writing advertising—digs me—she has a wild mind, finer than any girl I met—really—a real treasure—and such a lovely face—so fine a pretty face—young life in her—and real sharp agenbite of inwit thoughts like Lucien—Thos. Hardy. So have been seeing her for a week we talk and neck and will make it sure—but she has a kid (married at eighteen, kid four years old) used to sing in San Jose roadhouses and knows Mrs. Green [marijuana], etc. What a doll. And she’s not a flip thank god. Not a stupid square in any way but not a flip. Sheila Williams. She tried to get me a crazy job at store the first nite I knew her—instant digging each other—how wild and great. O well, to see how this proceeds—nothing ugly can happen anyway thank god, she’s too fine—she dug Sublette, etc. But we wander around alone and sit and drink coffee at her apt. and talk—and she digs the really good lines of my poetry, not just generally digs, but digs the specific tricks—well enough.