by Jack Kerouac
So, so, so dear Jack, please write us back, rescue Lafcadio temporarily (even if it’s a big mess) and if you can’t rescue him, don’t worry, don’t be bugged at us, but write us back what situation is, you can’t go out there, so we find other practical way. Hard to deal with events from so far away.
Can call Eugene and ask his car and help, if want—he’ll probably come on alright and sympathetic, tho he may be bugged being dragged—but probably not, he’ll think it an adventure and be glad to shine in your company.
Gregory alright, staying with us, writing. Paris great. Would there were no worm to mar my happiness. I’m free and don’t suffer anymore, in fact never did, but everyone else seems in trouble. Regards to Lucien and Merims (who wrote the other day about big party at his pad)—saw Dexter Allen and Baird and Mason, today, ah, I’m willing to cook beans in my room and not go out except to see pictures and meet 18-24 year old unspoiled angels—old angels are too down. Haven’t started making it with female angels yet, just got here, but soon have nice scenes I bet.
Write what’s new.
Love,
Allen
What does Holmes say? (John Clellon)
Jack Kerouac [Orlando, Florida] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France]
October 18, 1957
Dear Allen and Gang:
I’ve just sent in my 2 cents to Ferling on the subject of Gregory’s poesy: as follows: “I think that Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg are the two best poets in America and that they can’t be compared to each other. Gregory was a tough young kid from the Lower East Side who rose like an angel over the rooftops and sang Italian songs as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra, but in words. ‘Sweet Milanese hills’ brook in his Renaissance soul, evening coming on the hills. Amazing and beautiful Gregory Corso, the one and only Gregory the Herald. Read Slowly and see.”
(Okay?) As you know, (or do you?) Ferling asked for my Blues from Sterling and we mailed them to him. I told Ferling if he follows up to call my book Blues . . . nice sequence, Howl, Gasoline, Blues !!! Meanwhile I typed up “Zizi’s Lament” and sent it to Don Allen, who crossed me in the mail with your preface to Gasoline which is alright, in fact rather good . . . especially “hip piss.” So all’s swinging . . . but here (I think, I hope) is the truly great news: I wrote a play, a three-act play for Broadway or off-Broadway, one, definitely Leo Garen will produce it in his 2nd Avenue Yiddish theater but we also have Lillian Hell-man and big producers on the line, big press agent Joe Lustig who is also going to organize such immense poetry readings in the Spring that it will be worth all your whiles to come home early Spring and do it . . . he wants to do it with jazz and I’m going to tell him definitely to play a number, let a poet read a poem, play a number, let a poet read a number, but NOT mix up jazz and poetry together like SQUARE OF SAN FRAN. Joe will take all our advice, he is nice Yiddish saint, in fact Allen you must ally yourself with him and advise him, to have people like Chas. Olson and Gary [Snyder] read instead of Richard Howard and Popa Ididoud. (tho he sounds like he might be interesting.) The play will be called Beat Generation130 and is only the beginning . . . meanwhile too Leo Garen is eager to see Gregory’s plays . . . you can reach this mad little (director) cat thru Joyce Glassman, 65 West 68, get on ball. Plays! Productions! Leaping from the author’s box to the stage to make flower speeches! Homburgs! Operas! Red linings to black cloaks! Millions! Money! Cunts!—Drunk on the Bowery like Jack Dempsey! Falling on our head with Stanley Gould in the Ritz! Early morning whiskey sours in the White Horse! Throwing garbage pails at Caitlin Thomas! Kissing the feet of Nuns!—Do you rats realize that the Fathers of St. Francis of Assisi church 34th Street New York are actually saying a Mass for my spiritual and temporal welfare, at the request of two secret Dostoevskian nuns in a Connecticut monastery, because of what I said on TV? I wrote my play in 24 hours, no less, couldn’t sleep till it was done, there.—all argues in favor of spontaneous. Here’s the big news I wanted to say: ALLEN! you will play Allen Ginsberg in the play! rush to NY and become big actor, scream Rimbaud on the stage, sprawl between the Bishop’s mother and Aunt in Neal’s imaginary living room! it’s all about the Bishop Night, preceded by a day at the races and a first-act scene in Al Sublette’s kitchen with big Al Hinkle and little Charley Mew! A Comedy! the dialog pours like waterfall across the pages!—big part for Peter as Peter, Peter singing “can’t recall the hours, flowers” (Peter please send me title and words of that tearful rock and roll number so I can insert it in playscript in time for big producers to understand with cigars in mouths *—big part for Peter finally Peter Allen and Jack start screaming holy holy holy in front of Bishop . . . I have ah hunch I’ve re-done the American Theater with this one . . . it’s not even typed! I just finished it! Leo Garen is driving to Florida to see it! Airplanes are flying overhead!—When I get back N.Y. around New Year I’ll take up business on Burroughs manuscript, meanwhile Don Allen has it, I had Joyce Glassman call Philip Rahv, answer forthcoming . . . Peter’s gazelle on Moon beautiful . . . all beautiful, Gregory, Allen, all . . . My latest poem is: “Flesh the payer/spirit bills.” (I call them little ones “Emilies”)—Very latest poem: “I wooed her with the soft young glue.”—ooo—(meaning America, me young once). I wrote a poem “Too ashamed to show my asshole to Jesus Christ” and next day I had piles.
Jean-Louis
P.S. You won the trial in SF. My money not in yet—soon!
P.S. Germany just bought On the Road, Rowohlt Verlag Publishers.
Allen—my money so far has been one short story loot—but more coming and in January $8,000 royalty check! When and how and where you want your loot? (Rumor in N.Y. that I don’t want to pay you!)
Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Orlando, Florida?]
November 13-15, 1957
Nov 13, 57 Paris
Dear Jack:
Gregory brought his letter over, I’ll add a page and save stamps and reassure you, we are all still here, not bounded over Atlantic—reason I’m so still is I’m confronted with great backlog of unanswered letters, have just been sick in bed with Asia flu for two weeks, ago to now and been reading book on Apollinaire and learning more French. Suddenly I can read French a little better—not enough to read books, but enough to read poems I see quoted in books—I am all hung up on French poetry, I went into a big bookstore, saw French translations of whole plays by Mayakovsky, pamphlets of fine funny poems by Essenin, then the big bookshelves of XX century French bohemians, Max Jacob, Robert Desnos (a French girl said I looked like Desnos profile), Reverdy, Henri Pichette—all their huge books, Fargue, Cendrars etc., names, I never read them, but read a few by each, all personal and alive, Prevert, and all the funny surrealists, so I want to improve French and dig them, none translated, and all fine fellows, I can see from the pages of loose sprawled longlined scribblings they’ve published for fifty years here now—what sad treasuries for Grove or City Lights if anybody ever were able to have time and intelligence enough to organize and edit and transliterate them all, would be marvelous to read in U.S.—most of it almost unknown really. Anyway my French I happy to say, getting better so one day I’ll be like R. [Richard] Howard with French books in my house in Paterson and be able maybe to enjoy them.
Gregory as you can see, he improved in Frisco, and he improved since, and now is even riper, and is like an Apollinaire, prolific and golden glories period for him, in his poverty too marvelously, how he gets along here hand to mouth, daily, begging and conning and wooing, but he writes daily marvelous poems like the enclosed—enough already for another huge book since last month’s City Lights manuscript. Gregory is in his golden inspired period, like in Mexico, but even more, and soberer solemner, calm genius every morning he wakes and types last nites two or three pages of poems, bordering on strangeness, now he’s even going further, will enter a classical phase seen and possibly construct structural poems and explore big forms, his genius showered with strangeness.
We are getti
ng lots of great junk too, better than anything I ever had with Bill or Garver, so pure horse we sniff it, simply sniff, no ugly viaginal needles, and get as good almost a bang as a main line, but longer lasting and stronger in long run. Very cheap here too, and this around for Louvre visits.
Not yet explored Paris, just inches, still to make solemn visits to cemeteries Per Lachaise and visit Apollinaire’s menhir. (MENHIR) and Montparnasse to Baudelaire.
Granite surrounded by ivy.
I sat weeping in Cafe Select, once haunted by Gide and Picasso and well dresst Jacob, last week writing first lines of great formal elegy for my mother—“Farewell
with long black shoe
Farewell
smoking corsets and ribs of steel
farewell
communist party and broken stocking
O mother
Farewell
with six vaginas and eyes full of teeth and a long black beard around the vagina
O mother
farewell
grand piano ineptitude echoing three songs you know
with ancient lovers Clement Wood Max Bodenheim my father
farewell
with six black hairs on the wen of your breast
with your sagging belly
with your fear of grandma crawling on the horizon
with your eyes of excuses
with your fingers of rotten mandolins
with your arms of fat Paterson porches
with your thighs of ineluctable politics
with your belly of strikes and smokestacks
with your chin of Trotsky
with your voice singing for the decayed overbroken workers
with your nose full of bad lay with your nose full of the smell of pickles of Newark
with your eyes
with your eyes of tears of Russian and America
with your eyes of tanks flamethrowers atom bombs and warplanes
with your eyes of false china
with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots
with your eyes of America taking a Fall
O mother O mother
with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an ambulance
with your eyes of Aunt Elanor
with your eyes of Uncle Max
with your eyes of your mother in the movies
with your eyes of your failure at the piano
with your eyes being led away by policemen to ambulance in the Bronx
with your eyes of madness going to painting class in night school
with your eyes pissing in the park
with your eyes screaming in the bathroom
with your eyes being strapped down on the operating table
with your eyes with the pancreas removed
with your eyes of abortion
with your eyes of appendix operation
with your eyes of ovaries removed
with your eyes of womens operations
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy
with your eyes of stroke
with your eyes of divorce
with your eyes alone
with your eyes
with your eyes
with your death full of flowers
with your death of the golden window of sunlight . . .”
I write best when I weep, I wrote a lot of that weeping anyway, and get idea for huge expandable form of such a poem, will finish later and make big elegy, perhaps less repetition in parts, but I gotta get a rhythm up to cry.
Re Lafcadio: Good news, suddenly the long-lost father Orlovsky appeared on scene, visited, promised $10 a week support family, talked gravely and dignified with Laf, the crises in household still go on, but now not critical, no mad deeds will be done, so it can wait Peter’s return—we wrote you unrealizing you were already out of NYC—meanwhile Joyce Glassman wrote us and proposed she investigate with Donald Cook, so the situation’s there in hand and we got sensible fine letter from Laf, he has beard he says and will be great artist of space and time and draws constantly and sent us a burning red face in crayon of Laf-spaceman-mystic with eyeshields of red glasses.
Let me know when plays are ready. I think play down the Beat Generation talk and let others do that, it’s just an idea, don’t let them maneuver you into getting too hung up on slogans however good, let Holmes write up all that, just as “S.F. Renaissance” is true, but nothing to make an issue of (for us). I mean I’ve avoided generally talking in terms of SF as if it were an entiry. You only get hung on publicity-NY-politics if you let them or be encouraged to beat BEAT drum—you have too much else to offer to be tied down to that and have to talk about that every time someone asks your opinion of weather—it’ll only embarrass you (probably already has)—Let Holmes handle that department. Next time someone asks you say it was just a phrase you tossed off one fine day and it means something but not everything. Tell them you got six vaginas.
[ . . . ]
Bill’s manuscript [Naked Lunch] was read by Mason Hoffenberg who pronounced it the greatest greatest book he read of all time, Mason brought it to Olympia [Press] and assures me it’ll be taken (Mason wrote a porno book for them and knows them and is also an advisor) he is astounded by WSB and his reaction I gave great sigh of relief, I think everything’ll be alright with the book, it’ll be published here in toto intact. Meanwhile Bill sent me another thirty pages and says he has another hundred coming up with new final character like Grand Inquisitor who will wrap the whole book up in one unified theme and stream and interspace—time plot and fill in all lacunae and unify everything into perfect structure and delight, so.
I guess it will be published here then in the Spring. I wait to hear word this week and then will notify Bill. If. I think it’ll work out they’ll buy it tho terms are lousy, they only pay $600 per printing (i.e. if reprinted he gets another 600) but I’ll try get a formal contract reserving all mag. rights for Evergreen to Bill etc. I have to contact [Sterling] Lord and get name of his Paris office and have them arrange legal details as I personally don’t want to be responsible for another fuckup like Wyn. However with fugitive shady Olympia, the terms of publication seem bound to be disadvantageous and nothing much can be done, except the great main thing get book into print once for all. Perhaps I’m proceeding too nervously and in too much haste merely to get book in print irregardless of business hallucination dignities Bill deserves and might demand—what you think? I don’t know, I be relieved to see it actually accepted. But I’ll try to have Lord’s Paris office protect Bill.
[ . . . ]
I get lots of letters, also from many unknown young businessmen who tearfully congratulate me on being free and say they’ve lost their souls. I have to answer them all and have several dozen letters to write—which is why I seldom go near the typewriter, which is why I haven’t written you. And then I owe LaVigne six letters, and Whalen, and McClure started writing me again (he was seized with madness when he saw your Blues book, evidently Ferl is showing it around) and called it the great poem since Milton—also said he wept reading Road, in urinal scene with Neal, where you quarrel. And I always owe letters to Bill—and my unfinished project to finish another fifty pages letter to you recording continuing our Europe tour—still have all Italy and Vienna and Munich and Amsterdam to tell you about—which will do soon—and typing up poetry which I rarely do—there isn’t enough time for all the great flowery tasks. You must be snowed under, more than me, I wish I knew all details. (Oh, I found Lord’s address, never mind).
Still no sign Genet. What novel you writing? “Zizi’s Lament” is incidentally about a new disease we sent Bill a clipping about, KURU, a relative to Asian Amok and Latah, a laughing disease, “whole villages laughing themselves to exhaustion and death.”
I thought record was rotten (I played it in front of painter hipsters here and cringed) but Ferl says I should make a new full length LP he’ll put out with Fantasy records (it’s all signed up and arranged) so as soon as I get
voice back after flu will record whole book and new poems too. My record with Grove is censored and I’m mad and I got embarrassed, by my own tone because where I really rescued tearful seriousness in that particular reading was in parts two and three (which continued upward in beauty and non-goofing intensity tears)—and I asked Grove to print those parts on record—which advice ignored—so far as I think it’s all a goof that record—they missed the big meat, those vultures. However it don’t really matter. Besides I put out good record in time, or not, but will. So disgusted I sold my copy of record here for 800 francs to eat with (less than $2 to someone who was going to England). Bookstore friend of Ferlinghetti here has big window display of fifty copies of my book131 and sells a few a week so I get small income from that.
What number best seller are you nowadays? How dreamy that all is. Thank god. Neal wants $5000 or has he not written? We were talking about your money, our own fantasies and demands, but nothing we grub for will match Neal’s final Great Demand for fifty or ten thous for the hosses. Whatcha gonna do? I should write him a letter. I wonder what he’s thinking. When Howl trial was over there was a front page banner headline all across page of SF Chronicle announcing results—wonder what he thought—and did he see you on TV?
[ . . . ]
I haven’t ever received a copy of Road, if you ever get time to take necessary steps. Tell Viking there’s not one copy on sale in Paris and they could make a fortune here too. In English—several hundred copies anyway. Shortage I guess.
It was I suggested to Ferl several months ago for the 10th time that he reread your blues for City Lights, may I add. I also told him to read Bill’s book for a short printable selected Burroughs—perhaps Word. However, whether it was my suggestion that prompted him or no, when he contacts you about your book (presumably I guess he’ll do something) remind him to read Bill’s and get it to him after Grove is done, I think he might do it. That way some Burroughs in U.S. I looking at your recent letters for unfinished business. (Never got Peter’s Venice letter).