Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (24 page)

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [n.p., New York, New York?] to
Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady [San Francisco, California]

ca
. March 8, 1952

 

Mon Cher Jack, Mon Cher Neal:

Things is going great. Since I last wrote you I have been working steadily at typewriter piecing together mad poems—I have already 100 of them, I'm jumping. Listen to this: I'm putting together fragments of “Shroudy Stranger,” with a small descriptive poem—too busy on fragments to get to the EPIC which will be next. [the draft of “Fragments of the Monument” was included here]

Now, what I want to know from you: my fantasies and phrases have gotten so lovingly mixed up in yours, Jack, I hardly know whose is which and who's used what: like rainfall's hood and moon is half yours. I am enclosing copies of poems that seem to stem from you, like rhetoric at end of “Long Poem”—is “very summa and dove” yours? I'm not haggling I just want to know if it's OK to use anything I want that creeps in?

Spoke to [William Carlos] Williams on phone, go down to River Street tomorrow. He said he already (he hasn't seen the whole hundred, just about five poems) spoken with Random House (I thought it was going to be New Directions) and book may be there. Isn't this crazy? I've been off my nut with work and giggling. Speaking of which one poem enclosed beginning “Now Mind is Clear” sounds like synopsis of Giggling Ling. Is that OK? Also I enclose, “After Gogol.” Do or did you use the idea? If I use it will it screw up you? Fuck, lets both use it. [John] Hollander thinks I have burst forth like Rilke and cries whenever he looks at me, for amazement. But I tell you really, though I'll be depressed and incompetent and in a bughouse in three weeks, I swear I really have got the whole metrical problem at last by the balls, and that been holding me up—meter, breaking out of it, and talking like we really talk, about madtown. I was all wrong.

Listen to these “poems”: (a book if any will be called
Scratches in the Ledger
; and will be dedicated to Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr and Neal Cassady: “VAST GENIUSES OF AMERICA WHO HAVE GIVEN ME METHOD AND FACT”)

 

 

Jack Kerouac [San Francisco, California] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]

March 15, 1952

 

Dear Allen:

Blow, baby, blow!

I never knew you'd realize you're great poet without my help (in telling you, that is, not in genius, “assistance”) (is completely your own). Summa and dove.

In fact your letter was read by big great Neal and, without even knowing of its existence, Carolyn found it under the garbage sink where the baby girls threw it; otherwise I might never have seen it. (Neal loves you—he just works sixteen hours, twenty hours a day at hard crazy labour, for no reason except alleviation of his anxieties about the world and also saving up for a big Carolynhomecoming trip to Tennessee in their station wagon all five of 'em—Jamie, Cathy, Jack Allen, Neal, Carolyn—I may ride with them far as Nogales to go get me a store of T. [marijuana] for my next litry effort—but Neal's awright, disregard he can't write, he has no thumb.)
⁷⁸

The only phrase which I have used in
On the Road
is “strange angel”—disregard ANY worries about “stealing from each other”—I steal from you all the time, it's okay—anything that creeps in is the only truth . . . we're creeping in the shroud. Please however, make these two improvements in your poems

1. it was to be a mass of images moving on a page . . .

(NOT “moving on
the
page”—see?)

moving on a page is like “paranoia about a crash.”

Correction No. 2—also,—

Cuban cousin meets Cuban cousin

in a dim-lit listing focasle.

not
“in a dim-lit foc'sle” because that spelling is too labored, obvious and stupid, as we all know . . . by deliberately misspelling focasle (instead of forecastle) you are using a poet's prerogative which was once a seaman's—I know everything about language, I'm like Ezra Pound in a past.

I must type up
On the Road
at once but dammit Neal and the railroad keep pestering me with work, and I keep losing the money I painfully earn in stupid accidents and connections that don't come back with my loot, I'd rather lay up in the attic with my innumerable moans, broke.

is I guess the greatest statement you ever made. Didn't I show this kind of enthusiasm before Random House? When you “open your mouth to sing,” however, you are the end . . . and the beginning . . . the greatest living poet in America and I guess the world, “no hyacinthic imagination can express this cloaked man”

Now we shall go to Paris and Venice together, within a year.

CARROUASSADY is the name of the 3 vast geniuses, but don't fuck up your dedication with
that
anagram.

One possible furtherbility

make “jumping with jazz
into
the Pacific” like you mused . . . maybe, only maybe . . . LATER, in a bum beanery on 3rd St.

I must be headed for a big breakdown, I've never been so exhilarated and exuberant—like you, I'm blowing my top with words words—They come to me muting in a mad dream, I have it all solved, etc.—Good bad, so what, okay, Allen, Neal C. I'm going to see him in fifteen minutes at his tire-recap garage, drink wine from my pocket while he works, we'll talk about you, go home for supper together, pick up a can after in the evening, we're inseparable, immitigable, unsolvable, won. The “French onion soup” in this bum joint tastes like a shroudy stranger tincan special. I threw horseradish in.

I think it would be a good idea for you to use those side-remarks like you have in your letter to me—“I think of this week's humiliations” capped with “opening statement” on the side, you know what I'm talkin about . . . and “the shame of my poor beat down brother” is capped “example,” and then “the whole crooked ass unlazarus like lot of em” capped curse, and then “not a come in a carload” is “expansion of curse,” a pure method. Incidentally, too, don't say “crooked assed” but just let “crooked ass” adverb its way by itself.

Let me know about [William Carlos] Williams on River Street if you did it together.

I haven't written to Bill [Burroughs] but will tonight because I think I'll go to Mexico for two months now.

When do you think we should go to Paris? I'll be passing thru NY before year's out, as seaman, so we can plan and write; a colored buddy of mine is going to make it with me there, either meet me, or go with me, his intention being, to eat lovely white girl's cunts and mine to fuck and eat them . . . but with you it would be big Genet underground explorations at the same time and the glamour of our two books about to come out and [Bob] Burford, [Allan] Temko, all of em,
⁷⁹
and wine, the gamut. I am have become completely sexmad and completely incidentally straight, that is no virile Ow without aMOw . . . When you realize that the “shrouded stranger” itself was my original phrase, and as you say, “lovingly mixed up with my phrases” etc. there's nothing we can do about it—I think I could find some of my prose which uses some of your feelings, lemme see, but anyway, don't worry about that at all because I'm overflowing and don't need anything or to worry about anything, so long as I've got my wine and shit and cunt I guess. Haven't been laid for three months except—shit, tell Dusty. No on the other hand, hell, fuck it—Just now dammit two men walking down the street with wine bottles and a swaddled baby, pause a while in a waterfront door to slug, the baby's too young to know—I realized they just don't know how completely sad life or themselves or the whole void is, damn I'm high and gone and a crazy one—drunk now, on wine, writing this to you, let me know, (O for Fhri cirhe eu) P

Please tell Carl Solomon to mail me, at once, the first 23 pages of
On the Road
so I can see what I'm working on, I have no copy of that myself. Okay? please do, it's important.

Eugene [Brooks] sent me splendid efficient legal papers that will save the day for me; I appreciate him hugely; he doesn't ask for fees; but when I see him, or in the future, soon, I can give him, if he needs, what ever it is, or whatall, you know, embarrassing; but in any case he's great and thank him personally for me in your own words, as I've thanked him in a letter recently.

I'm going to start typing my novel this week.

I'm just rambling, don't know what I'm saying, got to go buy bread now and Neal pays no attention to anything some days like today, he just says “Yeah, yeah,” to everybody and anything, isn't listening, in fact is slightly deaf, and just doesn't care,—and this, finally is the reason why I can't establish a permanent formal relationship with him . . . I don't care if he
is
relaxed, I'm interested and excited and that's all, and will go to my founts without him. He's the most un-reassuring guy in the world. Incidentally, write a note to Carolyn next out, she really is a gone gal and the one likely successor to Joan (not Dusty, who isn't intelligent like C).

Well so long buddy I gotta go—morderoga. bye Allen Mountain

Give my best to everybody—say hello to Alan Ansen if you see him and how I'm still sorry I missed our appointment at his pad in Elmhurst when I came out here instead.

“Across from that rocky village with its cactus foundations is an earth of the young Jesus; they're bringing the goats home, long stepping Pantrio comes fumilgating along the maguey rows, his son gave him up a month ago to walk barefoot to Mexico City with home made mambo drum, his wife gathers blossoms and flax for his embroideries and kingdoms the young inquisitive carpenters of the village quaff pulque from urns in the goateries and shelli-meeli-mahim of Mohammedan Worldwide Fellaheen dusk and nightfall, Ali Babe be blessed.”
Road

But please don't use any of my new words (such as fellaheen on a big scale like I'm doing for instance) till later altho I dig “inquisitive” as a you-word.

Jack

Allen Ginsberg [n.p., New York, New York?] to
Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac [San Francisco, California]

March 20, 1952

 

 

March 20?

 

Dear Folks:

Well Neal I read your novel and it's coming along fine. Even the early tight-assed section on parents reads easily now (on 3rd or 4th reading. I read it a few times two years ago) and it improves with each reading—all that effort despairing as it was was not wasted but should be kept as is. It also gets better from rereading I notice more and more humor in it—the sections you invented are very great—as I was once struck with the collapsed porch and old man Harper. You seem right to me in thinking you are picking up pace and ease in jumping along in detail blowing Proustwise. As described in your letter to Carl [Solomon]—whether or not you had faith in yourself to go on in that way—you are right. The more frantic and personal you blow the better, it sounds more and more beautiful by the page.

I gather from Carl he is sending you letters telling you to go to writing classes (though he does accept and like your novel—more, even than he admits in public) but I think he—in fact I know he—is very hung up with his own personal metaphysics of publishing—and it is a metaphysical structure of no mean—and in fact it is a great structure—proportions who's labyrinths he is haunting these days (the last year)—so really disregard—I say, from my vantage point on top of the ass-teasing skyscraper pinnacle of the East—everything he says and continue to follow your and Jack's hearts. Carl is worried about form—and literally has confused whatever “form” is with the temporary, in fact weekly shiftings of necessity and opinion in his publishing office.

You see (both of you) he has now on hand a million strains and squabbles at Wyn's. He's really the only one there with any knowledge and everything hip he does is so fucked up and made problem of by his office he is having a nervous breakdown almost. He went off, in fact, this week, for a week's rest. Alone in the woods upstate N.Y. in a rest camp for “physically—mentally tired businessmen.” Among his problems have been:

All in all Carl—with my pushing him and yakking at him and trying to influence him all the time to counteract evil effects of office (we're even planning a Huncke revival)—has actually begun to officialize the new movement in literature which, Jack, as you said, years ago, is only us after all. All things considered I have really come to believe that between us three already we have the nucleus of a totally new historically important etc. etc. American creation. Nobody knows how ripe we are now already, yet.