Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (7 page)

So when you see Van Doren—tell him I plan to take my novel (380,000 words) to him, tell him I
will
take it to him in the middle or end of May, completed novel: tell him it's the same one I told him about 2½ years ago and go and tell him that I have laboured through poverty, disease and bereavement and madness, and this novel hangs together no less. If that isn't the pertinacity or the tenacity or something of genius I don't know what is. Go tell him that I have been consumed by mysterious sorrowful time yet I have straddled times, that I have been saddest and most imperially time-haunted yet I have worked. And tell Martin Spencer Lyons, poor rueful ramshackle oddity that he is, that he has succeeded in annoying a man of action. So long man. Tell me of Hunkey [Huncke].

Man of enigma-knowledge and despair of aggression,

J.

 

P.S. The thing I like about Van Doren is this: he was the only professor I personally knew at Columbia who had the semblance of humility without pretensions—the semblance, but to me, deeply, the reality of humility too. A kind of sufferingly earnest humility like you imagine old Dickens or old Dostoevsky having later in their lives. Also he's a poet, a “dreamer” and a moral man. The moral man part of it is my favorite part. This is the kind of man whose approach to life has the element in it of a moral proposition. Either the proposition was made to him or he made it himself, to life. See? My kind of favorite man. I have never been able to show these things to anyone from a fear of seeming hypocritical rather than sympathetic, or simpatico. Thus, if he should happen to like my novel, I would get the same feeling that Wolfe must have gotten from old [Maxwell] Perkins at Scribner's—a filial feeling. It's terrible never to find a father in a world chock-full of fathers of all sorts. Finally you find
yourself
as father, but then you never find a son to father. It must be awfully true, old man, that human beings make it hard for themselves, etc.

P.S. Dig this line from my novel, in a Greenwich Village sequence: “In all these scenes (Greenwich Village parties) the grave Francis was like some veritable young officer of the church who had been defrocked early in his career after a scandal of tremendous theological proportions.”

P.S. And dig this description of New York: “They saw Manhattan itself towering across the river in the great red light of the world's afternoon. It was too much to believe, near, almost near enough to touch (like the stars), and so huge, intricate, unfathomable and beautiful in its distance, smoking, window-flashing, canyon-shadowed realness there, with the weave of things touching and trembling at its watery apron below, and the pink light glowing on its highest towers as bottomless shadows hung draped in mighty abysms, and little things moving in millions as the eye strained to see, and the myriads of smoke rising and puffing everywhere, everywhere from down the shining raveled watersides right up the great flanks of city to the uppermost places, etc. etc.” Then it gets darker—“And it was so: the sun was setting, leaving a huge swollen light in the world that was like dark wine and rubies, and long sash-clouds the hues of velvet purple and bright rose above, all of it somber, dark, immense, and unspeakably beauteous all over: everything was changing, the river changing in a teeming of low colors to darkness (dig that?), the abysses of the streets to darkness, etc., fabulous thousand-starred glitter, etc., etc., and finally,—” as you look across the river to Brooklyn—“the swoop of the bridges across the river—the river like pennies—to Brooklyn, to the teeming, ship-complicated, weaving-soft incomprehensibly ruffled water's-end and very ledge of Brooklyn.”

P.S. More, much more, but I'm tired

So long

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

Theme:
All the young angels rolling to the music of celestial honkytonks. (in a
roller skating rink)
Tuesday night May 18 '48

 

Dear Allen:

Thanks for writing. I'll be seeing you perhaps this Friday night, but now I don't want to discuss your letter
¹⁷
in detail due to the fact that it's a lot of ancient material with me. In answer to all your questions: yes. I have the same problems, of “personal-ness” in expression striving at the same time to be communicative (sweetly if you like.) . . . and all that, and yes, I have worked it out in my own way. In
Town and City
not as much as later, also. We can talk about it. Assured that I have “matured up to it” all-right; how could I miss?—I haven't done anything but write for years and years, and you know I'm not stupid and unintelligent. Perhaps I can help you by pointing out pitfalls. As to the novel, I already handed it in to Scribner's two weeks ago, and they're reading it now; no word yet.

But here is news that will interest you a lot, I heard from Neal [Cassady]. Oh these are the sweet dark things that make writing what it is . . . Anyway I heard from Neal, and I had to fill out an application blank for his employer attesting to his character. Assured that I piled it on in the best Bill Burroughs letter-manner. I think I said that he would be of “great initial value to your organization and purposes,” etc. The job is as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific railroad. From which I assume—and I guessed right—that Neal got in trouble, got three months, and they're getting him a job out of a jail agency of some sort. No peep out of Neal himself, however. The Southern Pacific is the most wonderful railroad in the world incidentally . . . on a Sunday morning, riding down through the sunny San Joaquin Valley of grapes and women-with-bodies-like-grapes, I reclined on a flatcar reading the Sunday funnies with the other boys, and the brakemen smiled at us and waved cheerful. It is the hobo's favorite road. Anybody with any sense in California can ride between Frisco and LA endlessly on that road, once a week if they want to, and nobody will ever bother them. When the train stops at a siding, you can jump off and help yourself to fruit if you're near a field. So wonderful Neal is working for a wonderful railroad, in the Saroyan country . . . (if there's any beastly murderousness it's not my fault or Neal's or Saroyan's.) The Santa Fe brakemen will kill you if they catch you and if they have enough clubs. But not the SP.

I had a season, Allen, I had a season. It lasted exactly four days. She was eighteen years old, I saw her on the street, was riven, and followed her into a roller skating rink. I tried to roller skate with her and fell all over the place. Young and beautiful of course.—Tony Monacchio, Lucien's friend (and mine) was conversant with my beautiful season . . . He thought that the girl, Beverly, was too dumb for me, not vocal enough. I hated the thought of it . . . you can't imagine how madly in love I was, just like with Celine [Young], only worse, because she was greater. But finally she rejected me because “she didn't know me, she didn't know anything about me.” I tried to get her over to my house to meet my mother for God's sake but she was afraid I was trying to trick her, apparently. Sweet love softly denied. She thought I was some sort of gangster . . . she kept hinting. She also thought I was “strange” because I didn't have a job. She herself has two jobs and works herself to a bone, and can't understand what “writing” is. Tony Monacchio and I found Lucien dead drunk in Tony's room after a party—on the night that Lucien was supposed to fly to Providence for his 2-weeks vacation. We helped him to the Air Lines bus. He was bleary-eyed, blind, wearing brown-and-white saddle shoes like a Scott Fitzgerald character of the 20s. I suddenly realized that Lucien is drinking too much after all and that Barbara [Hale]
¹⁸
is not doing anything about it. I mean he was really sick. Tony said to him, “Jack's girl is sweet and beautiful but dumb.” And Lucien, out of this dizzy sickness of his, said—“Everybody in the world is sweet and beautiful but dumb.” Allen, these are the things, these are the things, don't worry about the
theory
of writing, not at all. Then Lucien thanked us for escorting him to the “airplane” as he called the bus, and there was a farewell. That afternoon my little girl rejected me. So now, how are you? How's everybody in the sweet beautiful dumb world?

Jack

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [n.p., New York, New York?] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]

after May 18, 1948

Monday Night : 1:30

 

Dear Jack:

I got your letter Sat. evening—I had been in Paterson for a few days. I will be in this weekend (in N.Y.).

You seemed overly proud that it was “ancient material.” What I was saying in part (lesser part) was that it was not recognizable (to me in your prose) but but but. This is not the same old maturity that I (as [Bill] Gilmore) have been talking about before. This is something I wouldn't have the slightest idea if Gilmore would understand and don't care much. But you are right, perhaps it's under my nose in you. This is a kick I don't want to continue.

School is over and I have been reading Dante, which I have found very inspiring. I finished the
Divine Comedy
during the term, and am reading books including
The Vita Nuova
(New Life) [by Dante Alighieri]. I dreamed up an enormous tentative plan tonight, which I will tell you about. My interest in reading is the profit by other men's experience. I sometimes find (only lately) authors talking directly to me, from the bottom of their minds. I think I am going to write a sonnet sequence. I want to read Petrarch and Shakespeare, Spencer and Sidney, etc. and learn about sonnets from beginning to end, and write a series on love, perfectly, newly conceived. I conceived the whole idea all at once seeing the first word in a title embedded in a page of the
Vita Nuova
: my poems have always been prophesied by their titles. That is, a poem often has a single “transcendent, personal, and serious idea” behind it, as a novel—a single image. I want to celebrate my “lovers” in all various manners, intellectually, wittily, passionately, raptly, nostalgically, pensively, beautifully, realistically, “soberly,” enthusiastically, etc., every possible perception fitted out in inwrought, clear, complex stanzas—including the one as yet undefined or un-stated mood, or better, knowledge, that I have and that at times you are aware that I have, no matter how silly I get. The title of this is: “The Fantasy of the Fair.” Just repeat it aloud, it carries the whole idea in it. One of the major ideas is the dynamic sense of “Lucien's Face” which you once propounded to me and which I half understood at the time. I want to formulate it poetically, if possible as the end of the poem, but without any private or subjective, or N.Y. idea of L.I. [Long Island] use the name to bridge at the moment. I am talking about humanity, and beginning to try to write in eternity.

I have been enduring a series of troublesome dreams lately about Neal [Cassady]. Your notice comes at about the crisis of them, though it is not a passional crisis and is accompanied by no tempests of intellect. I wonder what he is doing in his eternity. I feel so far away from people, without loneliness, that I am rather happy now. [ . . . ]

I'm not worried about the theory of writing, I am only just vering the practice. The Doldrums are antiquated. For that reason I am sending poetry out for the first time. I got my first rejection slip from
Kenyon
; a note from J.C. Ransom, editor and poet: “I like very much this slow, iterative, organized and reflective poem. At times it's like a sestina. Thank you for sending it. But still I think it's not for us exactly. I guess we need a more compacted thing.”

I had sent them “Denver D. [Doldrums]” but, as luck would have it, I have some compacted things around that he will get next week.

Your season sounds beautiful. I particularly wish I had seen Lucien so drunk. Make what you want out of that.

No, it sounded like you. (Some one is singing a ditty “So please pass a little piece of pizza”) and it makes me wish I were alive, that's why I can't say any more.

Everybody's fine, but it's sweet, beautiful, but not so dumb, this world. Lucien means dumb because we don't know what we know. I mean, won't admit how much we know.

White
¹⁹
said that Scribner's rejected you, too, just like the goil. Can I see the novel [
The Town and the City
]? But don't worry, it really don't mean a thing. That's my opinion.

Grebsnig

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [East Harlem, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [Ozone Park, New York]

July 3, 1948

 

Dear Jack:

[ . . . ]

Yes, daddio I am in Harlem, reading
Huckleberry Finn
. I have a radio and I listen to everything when I like it, Durgin
⁶
comes in and out all hours of the night drunk giggling over silly absurdities, we have short and long mad, even gleeful conversations, and I sit and write, and he sits and writes on T. Aquinas and Martin Buber and Shakespeare, and coughs. I am working up a great brotherly feeling for him, he is pretty great, and really sad. He knows all the bars all over the city: he knows the city, and he doesn't care, he is too thoughtful over the Soul in a theological way. He is going away to have his lung deflated up in Saranac
²⁰
in a few days. I sit and tell him improvised stories about walks I take into Harlem, about seeing Lester Young at the Apollo, who Lester is, how he looks when he blows, about the landlady who is an old Jewess named Mrs. Bitter, etc.

What happened to [Allan] Temko
²¹
in Frisco? Couldn't take it? What does he know about Horror? What does he care, why doesn't he get a job and stay there like an honest man? Why doesn't he go to Paris and stay there and roll in the gutter? I can see him making a niggling fortune in the black market and sitting in Rumpelmeyers taking his perspectives. Tell him to take a pilgrimage to Aix (Cézanne) or Charleville.