Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (3 page)

Edie and I looked into D. Klavier [David Kammerer]'s old room—all the penciled inscriptions on the wall had been painted over by some philistine house-painter. The little graphite mark above the pillow is no more—it once bore emblem (where plaster had fallen off the wall) “Lu—Dave!” The snows of yesteryear seem to have been covered by equally white paint.

To get off this morbid
recherché tempest fortunatement perdu
, I'm reading Jane Austen and finishing Dickens's
Great Expectations
. I also started Brontë's
Wuthering Heights
for the second time for an English course; and of course I am also plowing thru about 4 history books at a time (when Edie isn't chewing my ear) mostly about revolution in Europe in the 19th century. When I am finished I will start one here.

Give my fondest love to Grumet [Jacob Grumet, the assistant district attorney]—
A pet de eu fease
.

Allen

 

 

 

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

ca.
September 1944

 

Dear Allen:

Let you not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments—love is not love which alters when it altercation finds—O no! 'tis an ever fix'd lark . . .

Our wedding anniversary fell on the day of the liberation of Paris. I suppose this news Lucien now views morosely—he who wanted to be in Paris among the first. That event will have to wait now . . . but surely it will come about.
⁴
I'd like to go to Paris after the war with Edie, Lucien, and Celine—and a little money for a decent flat somewhere in Montparnasse. Perhaps if I work hard now, and establish my fortune swiftly, I can realize that transcendent ambition. You yourself might lay down your legal labours
⁵
for awhile and join us there. The new vision
⁶
would blossom . . .

But this is all speculation, mediation, nay, emasculation . . . Thanks for the letter. It moved me at times. I find in you a kindred absorption with identity, dramatic meaning, classic unity, and immortality: you pace a stage, yet sit in the boxes and watch. You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishable chaos, in sprawling nameless reality. Like myself, you deserve the Adlerian verdict, but we don't care about that: Adler
⁷
can name our egocentricities, but only because he himself is an egocentric . . . (the dirty bastard.)

This mania stems from the great Germans, Goethe and Beethoven. He who seeks all knowledge, and then all life and all power—and he who identifies himself with thunder. He is egocentric. But how paltry is the definition.

Lucien is different, or at least, his egocentricity is different, he hates himself intensely, whereas we do not. Hating himself as he does, hating his “humankindness,” he seeks new vision, a post-human post-intelligence. He wishes more than Nietzsche proscribed. He wants more than the next mutation—he wants a post-soul. Lord only knows what he wants!

I prefer the new vision in terms of art—I believe, I smugly cling to the belief that art is the potential ultimate out of the humankind materials of art, I tell myself, the new vision springs. Look at
Finnegans Wake
and
Ulysses
and
The Magic Mountain
. Lord only knows the truth! Lord only can tell!

Well, goodbye . . . and write: tell me more about the shadow and the circle.

Jean

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [n.p., Paterson, New Jersey?] to
Jack Kerouac [Ozone Park, New York]

ca
. late July 1945

 

I am sorry that we could not rescue a final meeting from our departure. The good Dr. Luria [a doctor with the Merchant Marine] told me you'd called, and I sent another postcard in haste. I'm writing a last time in the hope of reaching you before your voyage.
A moi
—Tomorrow morning, all the preliminaries having been dispensed with, I shall sign into the Merchant Marine.
Incipit vita nuova!
Monday I shall leave for Sheepshead Bay, where I hope to tutor myself anew in all these strange realities I have learned from the purgatorial season.

Your letter came to me after I returned from a fruitless journey into New York to recapture the grandeur of another time, and it came, almost, as a letter from the past, and conjured up in me all the emotions I had been seeking the days before.

But, Jack, rest assured that I shall return to Columbia. Bill [Burroughs] never advised me to stray from the fount of higher learning! I should return, however, to finish college, even if it were only a pilgrimage of acceptance of former time.

I hear from Celine [Young] from time to time; I saw her two weeks ago. I'll probably see her before I leave. Hal [Chase] has returned to Denver for the summer (a week ago.) Nothing from Joan [Adams] or John [Kingsland]. I still see [Lionel] Trilling
⁸
from time to time, he's invited me to his house (yes, I received the invitation, I acknowledge, with my usual pleasure at such things.) I hope I hear from you from Paris; at any rate, please write when you get back to the U.S., before you leave for California.

I understand, and I was moved that you were openly conscious that we were not the same
comme amis
. I have known it, and respected this change, in a way. But perhaps I should explain, for I have felt myself mostly responsible for it. We are of different kinds, as you have said, and I acknowledge it more fully now than before, because at one time I was fearful of this difference, perhaps ashamed of it. Jean, you are an American more completely than I, more fully a child of nature and all that is of the grace of the earth. You know, (I will digress) that is what I most admired in him, our savage animal Lucien. He was the inheritor of nature; he was gifted by the earth with all the goodness of her form, physical and spiritual. His soul and body were consonant with each other, and mirrored each other. In much the same way, you are his brother. To categorize according to your own terms, though intermixed, you are romantic visionaries. Introspective yes, and eclectic, yes. I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America. Lucien and yourself are much like Tadyis [the young, handsome boy in
Death in Venice
]; I am not so romantic or inaccurate as to call myself Aschenbach [the old professor who is infatuated with Tadyis], though isolate; I am not a cosmic exile such as [Thomas] Wolfe (or yourself) for I am an exile from myself as well. I respond to my home, my society as you do, with ennui and enervation. You cry “oh to be in some far city and feel the smothering pain of the unrecognized ego!” (Do you remember? We were self ultimate once.) But I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness, what you would (perhaps unkindly) call my “hypocrisy.” I am no child of nature, I am ugly and imperfect to myself, and I cannot through poetry or romantic visions exalt myself to symbolic glory. Lest you misunderstand me, I do not, or do not yet, own this difference to be an inferiority. I have sensed that you doubted my—artistic strength—shall we call it? Jean I have sincerely long ceased to doubt my power as a creator or initiator in art. Of this I am sure. But even if I would, I cannot as you look on it as ultimate radiance, or saving glory, redeeming genius. Art has been for me, when I did not deceive myself, a meager compensation for what I desire. I am bored with these frantic cravings, tired of them and therefore myself, and contemptuous, though tolerant, of all my vast powers of self-pity and self-expressive misery. What am I? What do I seek? Self-aggrandizement, as you describe it, is a superficial description of what my motives are, and my purposes. If I overreach myself for love, it is because I crave it so much, and have known so little of it. Love as perhaps an opiate; but I know it to be creative as well. More as a self-aggrandizement that transcends the self-effacement that I unconsciously strive for, and negates the power of self-aggrandizement. I don't know if you can understand this. I renounce the pain of the “frustrated ego,” I renounce poetic passive hysteria; I have known them too long, and am worn and enervated from seeking them too successfully. I am sick of this damned life!

Well, these last years have been the nearest to fulfillment of my desires, and truthful feeling I thank you for the gift. You were right, I suppose, in keeping your distance. I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your pity. I overtaxed my own patience and strength even more than I did yours, possibly. You behaved like a gentlemen; though I think that you did take me too seriously, assign too much symbolic value to my motion and friction. There is much that was not merely ironic, but also purposeless and foolish in myself and my activity. I can't forget Burroughs' tolerant smiles as I mockingly and seriously explained to him all the devious ways of my intelligence. Still, Jack, I was conscious of all that I did, and inwardly sincere at all times, and this I have always been. I wonder if you comprehend the meanings which I can't explain. Well, though in poetry I shall lie whitely and elevate these frustrations to “wounds,” I shall have flashes of insight and know better. At any rate, if you are able to understand me, I ask your tolerance; if not, I plead for your forgiveness. When we meet again I promise you that seven months will have elapsed profitably, that we will meet again as brothers in comedy, a tragedy, what you will, but brothers.

What is ahead I do not know; a valediction is our heritage; the season dies for a time, and until it is resurrected we must die as well. To all who perish, all who lose, farewell; to the stranger, to the traveler, to the exile, I bid farewell; to the penitents and judges of the trial, farewell; to the pensive and thunderous youth, farewell; to the gentle children and the sons of wrath, to those with flowers in their eyes, of sorrow or of sickness, a tender adieu.

Allen

 

 

Jack Kerouac [Ozone Park, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [Maritime Service Training Station,
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York]

August 10, 1945

 

Hello Allen:

It didn't develop so well at camp,
⁹
work and pay not being what I was led to believe, so I'm home again now. You make first with the letters.

I'm going to soda-jerk occasionally, enough to pay the fare to L.A. Also am writing a batch of potable magazine love stories, hope I can sell one of them.

(They wanted me to clean latrines at $30 a week at camp. Pfui.)

Let me know how you like or dislike Sheepshead.

Jean

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Sheepshead Bay, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?]

August 12, 1945

August 12.

 

“L'Automne deja.” . . . Il ya une annee jadis, si je me souviens bin, que le monde a venu a'sou fin.
Today is Sunday; this evening, or on the 14th, we violent and pensive children will be reenacting our crimes and judging ourselves.
¹⁰
The year somehow has passed quickly, almost has eclipsed itself. At moments when
les remords sont crystalisees
by some Proustian gesture, I think of the season of hell with a willing sentimental yearning. Today while I was trying to sleep I heard a negro singing softly, “you always hurt the one you love,” and I began singing it myself in homage. You must change your life!

The abrupt fluctuation of your personal fortunes
vis-à-vis
stable employment have ceased to surprise me, though they still are “kind of amusing.” I can't criticize your leaving the camp, but what I miscalled “Emotional Smugness”—a sense of something missing in your head besides bourgeois idealism, was responsible for your getting yourself into such [bettises?]. Don't you even know what you're signing up for? You have what my grandmother calls a
Goyeshe Kopfe
—a
Goy's
head—as differentiated from a
Yiddishe Kopfe
—a shrewd Yiddish foresight somewhat
a la
Burroughs. I haven't heard from him.

A
moi-l'histoire d'un de mas folies
—I've been encamped here for twelve days now. The boys here are all overgrown or warped adolescents—all screaming neurotics. Me, with all my highly advertised guilts and frustrations,
moi
, I was able to absorb the change to service with an equanimity and dispassionate benevolence unknown to the maritime. The second day here we were shown a botched version of Freud in a movie short, explaining to the demons of the streets that their backaches, leg pains, headaches, fainting spells, and melancholies were all functional—that their troubles were purely psychic. Some naive professional tough guy on my left leaned over and whispered in a sort of scared voice that jeez maybe he ought to see the psychiatrist like they say? I was surprised to find such an overwhelming preponderance of nervous wrecks who cracked under the initial “strain.” There is a great deal of stupidity in the management of this place. The petty officers etc. are all fat buttocked Marine sergeants with loud voices. They talk a lot about order and discipline but the administrative and ordering sections are the most confused, contradictory, undisciplined and disorderly crowd I've ever met with and the atmosphere breathes lack of definition and fosters anxiety. The first thing I did was follow a maxim of Burroughs' and find out the layout; I cased the joint; got all the regulations down pat, and defined myself. So I had no surprise and tension in my
Yiddishe Kopfe
when all went through with smoothness. I know the techniques of “fluffing off” (escaping duties and punishments and details). The routine here is routine; the telos is periphery, the preoccupation is “detail work,” which surprised me somewhat. I hadn't thought about what any army trains for. It merely maintains itself here with no exterior purpose. So I wash clothes, and practice neatness at all times, stow my gear properly in a clean locker, make my bunk, giggling to myself unobtrusively. There is also buffing detail. Buffing the floors (pushing buffing rags with the feet) is the standard routine for keeping the trainees busy. Since even cleaning reaches a point of declining output, when no more can be cleaned, we are put to doing it all over. This keeps us busy, teaches us discipline and attendance to duty. Since my presence here is voluntary and experimental, I don't take it all so hard and don't find myself itching to knock out anybody's teeth or go A.W.O.L. The Thomas Wolfish reaction to all this, of romantic disapproved and fiery rejection, doesn't particularly interest me. I question the consciousness and validity of gestures. Anyway, I'm enjoying myself, since I don't take it personally, and the change is, ah, refreshing. There is a beach here where I swim and laze in the sun on weekends. I miss music most of all. There are radios here but you know the story.