Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (17 page)

Red has all these visions, it's his last night in jail, and finally he says a prayer on his knees. Then begins the Pilgrimage hitch-hiking with benign imbecilic Smitty to California to look for his father, whom he only finds the following winter gambling in Montana saloons, after many dusty travails and crazy rides around the country with Vern, and many things including my own version of the Dark Angel and the Madman (remember Dostoevsky at the Apollo?) (In San Francisco this.) Finally everybody leaves and Red's alone, and that's where the story ends. This is I. (Also, there's a Mystic Tenorman who hitch-hikes around the country and Red keeps running into him, a wild colored cat, until Red's scared; he even sees him in the middle of the night walking in the Mansion of the Snake, the Bayou of New Orleans, with his Tenor Horn, and steps on the gas.) This is like the shrouded stranger.
On the Road
is the name of this opus; I want to write about the crazy generation and put them on the map and give them importance and make everything begin to change once more, as it always does every twenty years. When I die I'll be a shroud swimming in the Parade on the River, with skinny white arms and Lotus-Eyes, and that will be that, at night.

Thank you for telling me about Hodos Chamelientos. I'm reading Eliot and Crane and Dickinson and Robinson and even Keinvarvawc (a Celtic poet) and The Faerie Queene. More later. See you in September.

Old friend

Jack

 

1. Brierly invited me to a big party for Lucius Beebe here. He claims to be the “last of the Bourbons” and is a big fake . . . that is, he says the world interests him only insofar as it offers “the last remaining best things.” He's always plastered, and not happy drunk, either. I met Thomas Hornsby Ferrill and all the big society of Denver. I behaved like a fool. I yelled and told dirty stories and got drunk. Then I came back to my shack in the hills here, and rested and mused. I am surrounded day in day out by hordes of children and dogs, who come in the house. Today there were a thirteen-year old girl, a six-year old girl, a four-year old boy, an infant, a bird-dog, a mud-hound, two Chihuahua dogs and a cat. The thirteen-year old girl wrote a story on my typewriter about the Giant in the garden and the little children who were afraid to go in because they thought the garden door was locked, but it wasn't at all and the door opened, and they went in, and the Giant cried with joy. This proves to me that children really know more than adults. Children are preoccupied with the same things Shakespeare knew . . . gardens and fairies and enchanted islands and Giants and wizards and the whole stock of what might be called Metaphorical Cerebration in the Metaphysical Phantasy.

Is this not so?

Am I the Giant?—the one in the garden? Of course I am.

I love these little children and I love the Rubens countryside here and I am sorry that the whole world is not one small garden so everybody could be together all the time before they die and rot in the grave. And I will love Edie again before she goes.

Do you know what I think of the
mind
?—that it is made of various ordered myths, each with a direction of its own, and a hope (foolish or not); and that when you analyze and dissect these ordered myths (associative constellations) you shatter them and in their place erect One White Myth of Reason, which then arbitrarily directs and commands you; all that has happened is a loss of riches. The mind may become more coherent, but an organic tangle of vines is gone. Just as a jungle can be torn down for a cement factory. All the vines and the flowers and the cockatoos and the tigers go, and they make cement in noisy dusts. I see no reason to laud this. It is just another foolish mistake of man's. Centuries from now he will laugh and play.

The Denver Birds? I know a kid here who believes that everybody should be happy at his little job, making cement, etc., and be
predictable
so the Social Scientists can keep their papers in order. I feel like that fellow Denison. It's all a big mistake, everything but the flesh, and the mind is the flower petal of the flesh. It is the same juice as the flesh. Albert Schweitzer
⁴⁷
is at present saying this at the Aspen Goethe Festival here. I would love to hear his lecture in French tomorrow.

My editor [Robert] Giroux is flying out next week and Brierly and I are taking him to the Central City opera. It is very possible I will fly back with him, so I'll see you soon perhaps, if they allow it. I wish you would place your weary bones in lesser inaccessible demesnes . . . like the Dixie hotel or something, or Pokerino, or the Mills Hotel, or the Waldorf-Astoria. What fun is there in the Medical Center? Hey? What is it that finds you there?

 

(wink)

 

P.S. Hal [Chase] is dead.

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [Denver, Colorado]

July 13-14, 1949

July 13, 1949
Wed. Eve.

 

Dear Jack:

Comprenez
, I did not deliver myself to an actual bughouse to see what it was like in the sense that you meant, things and people. Write a letter to the editor—tell him that
I take my madhouses seriously
. That's how it is. As to selling my soul to the New Deal, that does not interest me now, the fear of doing that—I have been fighting and seeking punishment from an abstraction (society) and I have found the punishment in myself. (Weary am I of my sad majesty) The reactionaries have been prideful and arrogant too long, perhaps, but that is their affair. Perhaps Hal [Chase] is not dead—he knew me, and made me shudder. Sanctity is love and humility, and there is truth and self—A Great White Myth—vaster than the jungle of the unreal. I will be a lamb to “society,” I was never a jackal like Denison [Burroughs] or a lynx like Joan [Adams], though I have tried to be like everyone but
moi
. No?

Je Changerau
. There are no intellectuals in a madhouse. The rest of the people here see more visions in one day than I do in a year—tho profound gulfs appearing everywhere. Do you know what amnesia is? If you cannot speak a name which is on the tip of your tongue, which you don't remember—a line of poetry, or a person, etc. But what if that condition extends through greater areas than a single instance? What if you can't pronounce what's just beyond your mind—what if all memory is gone? The whole world new, and you familiar but unknown, even your name gone? People like this everyday here—and we speak of visions—others are lost. Nightmares are daily occurrences.

I have discovered that I have no feelings, just thoughts, borrowed thoughts taken from someone I admire because he seems to have feeling. I am tired of thoughts against the New Deal. If the New Deal can teach me to
feel
love for it, I will love it.

Words mean only what they say, what they state on the surface; infinity, nothingness, are literally inexistent. The only thing real is on the surface.

The bureaucrats are right—the proof is that I have spent my life fighting them. Why shouldn't they be right, except that if we thought so it would upset our established spiritual order? Very well, upset our old order. A revolution? Why not? Do you know what it would mean to the reactionary editor if he found out all of a sudden that he had wasted his life in a quixotic meaningless war against a true reality represented by the “bureaucrats.” The lice of eternity, the pits of reality—“O bitter reward of many a tragic tomb. The murderous innocence of the sea.” O Bleak Bill. He is afraid that I will find out that he is crazy, that his analysis of me was a tragic farce—not an absurd farce, but a tragic real one—that he has led me astray. Very well—write a letter to the editor declaring that one reluctant subscriber now finds that he has, despite his parent's warnings, been led astray—by wastrels and perverts. The scion of a noble family. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it, and make of it what you will, I am not Jesus Christ. I am Jerry Rauch.
⁴⁸
Mon pere avait raison. Ma mere elait fou.

Reality, as Claude De Maubri [Lucien Carr] well knows, is that familial and social community which we, as madmen, have discontinued. Oedipus Rex—he, he alone, caused the plague in the play.

If we were to love as intensely as we now hate, without hate's contradictions—and love the very things we hate?

And what else would be the answer, except that it is
we
, not they, who are crazy? That is a foreign policy alien and vast to the local isolationist publicists. I contemplate incredible logical revolutions different from any in the past decade.

What is this seasonal madness and pride in spirit that we have cultivated but a premeditated insult to other people? A defense against their love? The attendants in the madhouse love me, they want to help me. Why should I resent them and make jokes at their expense? I laugh alone. Roll my bones, roll my bones, don't leave my bones alone. We are all really crazy. You are crazy, too.

In sum I consider myself a sick man. Denison [Burroughs] was in a madhouse once but instead of learning something new he suspected that everybody there was trying to torture him. You too. Think of Kafka. That is the very Gate of Wrath.

You do not give me credit for sufficient abandon of spirit. I am happy, also, that Wilhelm Reich is right. He is probably more right than the rest of the analytic schools. I am also happy, also, that you and I will be together in New York in years to come. I might have gone to Denver if you stayed. Now we will call each other from our penthouses to our country houses by telephone each night in 1954.

Walter Adams is back. I have not seen him yet, but I will this Saturday. He wrote me 3 lines here—saying he would like to see me. Where is your mother going to live?

And Edie [Parker Kerouac] too!

Claude I called last weekend—short phone talk. All O.K. He is going out with someone, but won't say who over the phone. We are not going to meet again till fall.

Do you really want to finance this poor broken spirit on a trip to Paris? I will accept when the time comes if I am still crazy. Did you hear from Pomeroy [Neal Cassady]?

(Ha! How I intend to frighten Pommy someday!) I think of your stanzas the same thing that you do. Six water angels is the best, also waterharps and waterfalls, (I think all it needs is one running coherent
plot
to make it coherent—otherwise Arodos) (But you have that?) (water is your medium). Watery shrouds, 6 water angels sing enthroned—you are saying that it's all bullshit, all the symbolism. Bleak Blook the same.

Your prose has many more
bleak echoes
than before, is all you say it is also: “The utter gravity of our investigations.” That is what I felt in Cézanne originally, and your novel which converted me, amazing how our early frivolity changes alchemically. All balloons go up. Shadow changes into bone.

We will all be together again soon, don't worry. I personally will go get Pommy and Denison . . . when I go sane. I believe in the Great White Myth, I don't believe in the jungle anymore, really. Down with the associative constellations! Down with the constellations! I want to be directed and commanded by “Arbitrary Reason.” Which is as much to say 1.) God, reality is not arbitrary, but necessary, because true and in existence. The jungle is a big camp, a big fake. It doesn't exist, it's an illusion. What exists is real, what doesn't exist doesn't exist, it's nothing.
De nihil de nihil
. The great white myth is not cement and noisy dust, it is actually love in disguise. So far I'm the first (except Claude and perhaps Haldon [Chase]) to see this. 2.) To tell the truth I am a little doe who has just been devoured by a tiger and I don't believe in jungles anymore; and I seek the inmost shade.

But all our thoughts (even Denison's though he doesn't know it) meet in heaven. But I really don't agree with the editor anymore.

Now enough of this—and I will tell you tales of the madhouse—facts, anecdotes, stories, descriptions. I have tried to answer your real question of your whole letter, the last sentence—“Hey? What is it that finds you there?” Something that I am learning—becoming—something that I think is true, that the tone of your letter gently derides, anyway.

 

Thursday Afternoon [July 14, 1949]

Ignore everything I said except by reading between the exaggerations to what I can't express easily. I take my madhouses seriously; it seems I have been threatening and winking for years on the same kick. “What they undertook to do They brought to pass:

There is a pale Bartleby here, a Jewish boy named Fromm, (there are so many crazy Jews here) who sits in his chair. The first time I came in, I sit on a chair in the hall, waiting to be called to the preliminary routines of being shown my bed. He sat opposite me slumped over; he notices everything but won't say nothing. A big fat German refugee who helps run occupational therapy, a woman, came up to him and said “Don't you want to go up to O.T. today? Everybody else is there now. You don't want to sit here alone?” He raised his pale, weak head and looked at her inquiringly, but didn't say anything. Very gently she asked him again, hoping that he'd suddenly get up, perhaps, and follow her, repenting his loneliness. He looked at her a long time, pursed his lips, and slowly shook his head. Didn't even say “I prefer not to,” just shook his head meditatively, after a long time in which he seemed to have been considering the question seriously; but shook his head, no, rationally. I immediately assumed that I could penetrate his mysterious secret refinement—but no—he was a poor lost wandering child of time. But the doctors (a whole hospital full of liberal minded social experimenters) have been treating him here since time immemorial trying to make him say yes. He has gone through insulin and/or electric shock therapy, psychotherapy, narcosynthesis, hypnoanalysis, everything but a lobotomy, and he still won't say yes! He rarely talks—only once have I heard him raise his voice in the wilderness. I was told that it was a great disappointment to hear him at last, because he has a nasty whining complaining voice, that's why he won't talk. When I heard him, just two days ago, he was complaining about some bureaucratic mix up. It seems he had started to shave, finished half his face, and then was called to breakfast. He came back and found the razors locked up. He stood in the hall arguing with the nurse. She was saying “Mr. Fromm, but you must realize that there are certain set hours for shaving.” And he “But—But—But—I still have the soap dry on my face, I still have half my face shaved only,” etc. Once in awhile they take it in their heads to drag him by force up to occupational therapy, or to the roof. He doesn't say a word, just resists; they have to bend his arm back, painfully, and take him to the elevator. But he stands near the elevator door and mournfully taps on it indicating that he wants to leave, go back to his chair. He [never] makes any trouble otherwise.