Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

by Jack Kerouac

  Got your letter in Paterson, late, and thanked for check, happy you wrote, I wasn’t sure you wanted me to write so waited for a sign. Also got letter from Gregory, he visited Lapland is back in Paris, no word from Bill yet, Whalen says (he wrote) he’ll be visiting here in the fall or winter,—also Sheila Boucher [Williams]—my old girl—showed up, run away from husband, I took her on walk thru Bowery over the Manhattan Bridge for eternity wink of Manhattan. She was four days in jail in Minnehaha, midland, US, I forget, for vagrancy, met your sweet painter cat and traveling with him now. She says Gary [Snyder] came to her door, walked past her outraged husband, said, “Sheila are you ready?”, helped her pack, and drove her to SF. Gary wants to marry her she says—make her have babies in Japan. So Gary, she says, will be here later in Fall too. Also LaVigne coming. September. New York will be great this winter. Maybe we all give one mad poetry reading together, free to multitudes, no bullshit. I met Howard Hart, I didn’t dig his poetry, he recited me some, and all he talked about was bread and loot and wanted me to give expensive reading with him as partner, tried to hustle me I thought. I think you’re right, Lamantia and he are conmen of poetry readings and only give it a bad name. He fought with Lamantia in Frisco, on top of everything. Fuck that shit.

  [ . . . ]

  Lucien says you say you have Buerger’s disease—have you got a really good doctor out there? If not you should come in and see [Dr.] Perrone and get that straightened out. It sounds like it’s getting beyond the point where standing on head is effective treatment. Please take care of yourself you shouldn’t give up and go die now. I always needed you.

  Sneak in and come see us in a week or later if you stay there till September. I don’t want no wild scenes and drinking, nor want to see you drunk, nor will partake of big suicidal drunks no more. I’d rather just walk or sit and talk or go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and read Brueghel picture there.

  [ . . . ]

  Well later on—I’ll write again, send me a postcard to 170 E. 2nd Street so that I’ll know you did receive this letter safely and it didn’t fall into the sad hands of fate.

  Oh yes, I saw [William Carlos] Williams in Rutherford, had supper with him, his wife and he said they thought you were very charming and sweet, said to give you their regards. [Ezra] Pound came stayed overnight there after he got out of hospital—they thought he was wacky. He brought five people with him, wife and he also has a little girlfriend. WCW showed me a picture of them—W sad, sitting, Pound behind him thin and wiry and bare-chested both looking into home camera. Tell you about that later. Talked about measure and wailing with him.

  okokokokokok

  Kokomo

  Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York] to

  Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York]

  August 28, 1958

  Dear Irwin:

  Gone from the earth to a better land I know, I hear their angel voices calling Old Black Joe . . . I’m coming, I’m coming . . . for my head is bending low.

  That’s a nice song, now playing on my FM talkless Sunday music program. “Why do I sigh, that my friends come not again . . .” and that was the song I played on the zither on a stage before huge audience at age eleven. My favorite song, I see now.

  Yes, Edw. Marshall is a fine poet. But haven’t you discovered Stan Persky yet? I’ll bring in his work next time.

  Carolyn put me down in Berkeley last year so I’ll just stay quiet. Neal has money enuf I know. He never writes, if he does write to me that’ll be different because I’ll never forget the time I brought him candy and magazines in the hospital and he told me I had “descended on him.” Bleakjawed Neal was mad at me and one day I jumped off the engine at Bayshore and suddenly saw him, and he drove away guiltily.

  You’re probably right about rights for On the Road getting more valuable, but I want to see what happens with this mess now, they want Joyce Jamison to play LuAnne and that would make the picture a hit and I get five percent and Mort Sahl said he wanted the picture to hew very closely to the book, that’s better than MGM. Meanwhile MGM making a movie called Beat Generation with Jerry Lee Lewis, haven’t even consulted me about my copyright of that title in 1955 (remember, Jean-Louis, New World Writing ♯7, from a novel-in-progress BEAT GEN. copyright 1955 Jean-Louise etc.). So Sterling will sue for copyright payoff. I also have Holmes article attributing coining of phrase to me, and other stuff. They are really crooking me in H’wood, The Subterraneans for peanuts, etc. Imagine Sloane Wilson getting a half million dollars for A Summer Place. I don’t want all that but certainly fifteen grand is nothing in H’wood, or the 25 offered then reneged for Road. This sounds silly to you in your poverty but if I ever get an income (trust fund) started I’ll have money for you once in a while, gratis. Not for everybody, not for voracious Gregorys and Neals, but for kindly poet saints cooking lung stew in East Side quiet palaces. No I don’t have Buerger’s disease, I have a good doc called Rosenberg, I had boils and I guess they came from poison ivy getting right into my system from my constant retrieving of basketball from poison ivy patches. No, no phlebitis, nothing. My real problem is drinking. I drink alone and sometimes too much even alone. I take dexamyls to write and they not healthy (prescription). Do you remember that wonderful Benzedrine used to make us shit and sweat and piss and lose weight and get holy high, this dexymal constipates, fucks up, screws, agh, ugly depressions worse than benny. Our prurient medicos, wouldn’t give me benny. They got goddam codeine in those dexamyls, bet you any money, causes constipation. So I’m still fat.

  Glad you have long quiet talks with Lucien. I wonder how he can stand all those shouting visitors including me,? poor dog has no life of his own. He is really and truly a gracious aristocratic man. He said my “Lucien Midnight” was pejorative about him, shoulda been majorative. Can’t even find words in dictionary! I just wrote long letter to Joyce [Glassman] describing my current work, ask her to read it to you, if you want idea. I’m bugged and bored by it, but I was bugged and bored by Dharma Bums too. No more fun in writing for me. Blah. Bought a Webcor three speed and played my own record albums, my Norman Granz three albums are greatest poetry records since Dylan Thomas and I do think Granz is not going to issue them at all from prurience. I really read like a bitch. Nice low voice, too. Steve Allen album said to be coming out with Hanover Records, it is quite a little gem too. If you have a box I’ll bring them in. My own box weighs ton. Yes, and did Hart fight Lamantia physically or what? If you have big free poetry reading with Gary [Snyder] et al please don’t urge me to join in, I’ll just listen like in Frisco. I have offers to read for money all over country and reject em all. Too bashful, goddamit I don’t like to be on a stage. If Gary does come, and Phil [Whalen], it will be strange won’t it. If you want to get to Bob Lax, he’s phone TWining 9-1323, and lives at 3737 Warren St. Jackson Heights. He just sent me a letter, an empty envelope (!) (?) Great day in the morning, I go die now, I feel awful (dexies). See you soon. Snipsnip snip.

  They wanted me write commentary to Norman Mailer’s Hip and God talk, he says God is dying etc. kinda nonsense tho he is nice serious kid. But I don’t wanta get involved with him and his gang. They also wanted me to talk on stage with Max Lerner for $100 honorarium at Brandeis Univ., don’t think I’d like that, big gray faced liberal sneers . . . goodbye poor $100. When you and me and Bill have ALL our work published they’ll be no more talk about Nabokovs and Silones. What a long time it will take, and when it comes, it never matters anymore, and then we go into eternity and don’t care anyway. And so it’s already eternity and here we inward tomb bliss our sleep.

  Meanwhile Jonathan Williams sent me his awful list of dissident pisspoor intellectual wrecks, that whole BM [Black Mountain] gang is full of shit if you ask me . . . big abstract conceited tracts about nothing.

  Following each other,

  my cats stop

  When it thunders

  And as for Alan Watts, I call him Arthur Whane in Dharma Bums, which is Old English for horsefly, for the way he bit us
in Chicago Review. Ah, Heaven will respect us. In fact I’d better start respecting poor Mr. Watts. This fame shot makes you gripe more than blow, doesn’t it?

  Adios

  Jack

  Rosenthal at Chicago Review wants you to send him prose. Will write you c/o Paterson soon. Send him letter excerpt.

  P.S. I decided to accept that Lerner invitation and buy full set of oils and canvases. Royalty check just came in, half of what I expected.

  Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to

  Jack Kerouac [n.p., Northport, New York?]

  ca. August 31, 1958

  Dear Ghost:

  Well you’re the smart one. Why didn’t you tell me life was a dream? I got on some Nitrous Oxide, twice in a row for experiment, in dentist’s chair today—went thru all the kalps, kalpas, “in all directions” inside and out, like you say—never had such a time. Much to talk about, wrote some apt lines, dammit it’s all a big cheat—great universal razz like ridiculous woody woodpecker disappearing laughing into the receding eyehole of cosmic cartoon, all the universes disappearing all at once. I’m sorry I was so deaf, I was hung on Harlem God—I still don’t understand how both absolute impressions can exist without contradiction in the same universe. But I’ll let anything go in one ear and out the other.

  I want to reread your poems and Buddha books, now. Bring them in, the manuscript, please please—no joke serious. When you come in.

  All sorts of things falling into place, and plenty of time to let them, so don’t worry I’m not flipping. I just didn’t understand what you were talking about before, or Gary or Phil for that matter.

  I’m in Paterson, I’ll write from NY—got your letter.

  What a funny thing.

  Irwin

  P.S. Gregory’s letter was great—like Neal’s old one. I read “Bomb” drunk in Five-Spot at 3 AM to three people.

  Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York] to

  Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York]

  September 8, 1958

  Dear Allen:

  Got your letter about the dentists gas satori . . . or maybe supreme enlightenment I guess . . . yes, and if you want to follow up on the words on the subject, you know where to go . . . Surangama Sutra, Lankavatara Scripture, Diamond Sutra, the MAHAYANA WRITINGS (not Hinayana earlier crude moral stratagems) (tho Mahayana even more moral) . . . so, just get Dwight Goddard’s Buddhist Bible in library unless they haven’t replaced the copy I stole) . . . we’ll talk about it anyway. I don’t want to leave my unpublished Some of Dharmas etc. out of house and Don Allen (if you want see) has Mexico City Blues sutra at his pad now. Anyway, don’t worry. I just wrote big letter to Gregory praising him to heavens for making me cry at last, after all these years since Neal’s great letter. How sweet it is that a word-slinger can sling in prose or verse, hey? What mighty prose it is, what sounds emanate from his gregorytongue! Just as good as Neal. Both better than me, except I guess in Sax there I gets supernatural assistance and prose-tricks . . . but prose-tricks don’t add up to sighing tears prose. Poor great Gregory and Jesus how he suffered! Well, we’ll discuss that too. There’s a girl here, Jill Lippman, rich, sexy, thin fucky, who went with me to visit Lafcadio last Saturday nite and we saw him wandering in the moon and went in and talked in drear kitchen with Marie [Orlovsky] and looked at his paintings, his “simple” ones, that is, I know that he’s going thru a strange little rococo phase of his own . . . so we gave Marie Jill’s number so when you and Peter come you can call her and she comes in big car and gets us all for big moonlight swims but actually now it’s almost too late, she going to Yale school now . . . anyway. Did you see new Horizon magazine where you and me raked over coals again by another Columbia Trilling fink? But every knock is a boost and we sure gets boosted knocked raked and everything in this. Once more accused of fomenting teenage murder atrocities. That, my friend, you can lay back to Mr. Holmes who said in Esquire that it was extremely “significant” that a little nigger cretin pulled the knife out of Michael Farmer’s chest and said “Thanx, man, I wanted to see what it was like.” How a man can make irresponsible statements like that from his cloistered position I shall never know but anyway it appears these Trillingers seem to think WE said such a silly thing and that’s two critics now lay murder at our feet, . . . and you and me who don’t even hunt or even fish. They have our pictures, our poems, etc., they print the first page of Subterraneans saying and showing nothing because the book got rolling two, three pages later. Is it really true that Phil and Gary are coming? let me know. Sterling is dying to nab Gary for his future novels, . . . and Phil. (O yes, the murder hints from Columbia from Trilling I just realized today pretty soon they’ll be digging out Lou. If they do that they might have another murder on their hands.) Kingsland wrote me letter from Philly said he would drive to Northport and drop in, I told him it was my mother’s house, I guess he’ll be bugged, imagine huge swishy Kingsland walking into my mother’s innocent rosy kitchen. Paranoiac rosy kitchen but she did rise at 6 A.M. for a decade while I was allowed (believed in utterly) to stay home write my saxes and sexes so don’t forget that. [ . . . ] Don’t worry, I won’t maddrunk begscenes in your quiet stately pad when I comes in, if I comes in . . . ur ur ur . . . be in soon few weeks. A ton coeur.

  Jean

  Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to

  Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York]

  ca. September 16-17, 1958

  170 E 2 St NYC

  Sept 17 [sic: 16?], 1958

  Dear Jack:

  Quiet stately path pad alas alas hell, the girls are all here, plus a few tom-cats and FBI agents wandering around the Village inquiring of me if I’m from SF (a spade agent I heard about from paranoiac girlfriend of Peter—who’s temporarily moved in with us to satisfy his cunt Karma)—came up to me in Jim Atkins—as prophesied he always does to Village cats from SF—and said “don’t I know you from SF”—but I didn’t want to bug him so I said, no, which was true, and also, “I come from New Jersey really” which was also true, so he retired a little baffled—anyway Sheila [Williams] my old girlfriend is in one room here (been here two weeks and says she’s returning to SF as soon as someone bugged at her on the coast sends her the plane ticket, probably before this weekend)—she has nice painter boyfriend in side room with her they sleep all day and vanish gloomily onto the street for the night and come home and argue about his manhood.

  She says she and Gary were having a kind of affair, and Gary came got her with little car at her husband’s to rescue her drove her to Frisco and said he’d meet her in NY. But now she’s changed her mind and’s going back.

  Well, also, another girl named Sheila [Plant] from SF who’d made it with Peter and Laf there, and subsequently various hospitals, also today settled in, preparatory to her return to SF also (“I don’t believe I’m in NY. Is this NY?”) Peter’s having a nice time, so am I, it leaves me free to lie in bed stare at ceiling and read. What I’ll do is move into a private isolated side-room in the apartment and it’ll be like I had a lonely furnished room. So actually that’s all ok, and maybe even the present wave of dependents will unwave.

  So come in and get drunk as you want to, or not. I’ll be here, would like to talk to you.

  Better later, tho, Lucien invited us both out to upstate this weekend, but I have things to do here this weekend anyway and Lucien it turned out couldn’t get a car. He says later on in the fall.

  I went to New Directions to pick up copy of [William Carlos] Williams’ new Paterson which has a letter of mine, and met [James] Laughlin, talked to him. Explained to him about Gary and Phil’s unpublished books, he said he wanted to read them and maybe would publish them. I explained him how poetry appearances were getting fucked up by absence of their high-class work and Ferlinghetti’s blindness etc. I had just seen Don Allen for two minutes to pick up your Blues (which I had with me) and Laughlin said he wanted to see that also, maybe he could publish it complete I suggested. He said he was still interested and working on Vi
sions of Neal he thought was great prose, but having trouble with fearful printers—but would sooner or later be able to find one and would definitely do it. Also he asked for Gregory’s address and would write him a card.