Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (82 page)

Edie Parker was Kerouac's girlfriend at the time.

Ginsberg frequently used pseudonyms to disguise the true identity of the people he was writing about. Here it seems probable that Louise was either Joan Vollmer Adams, with whom Edie and Jack were sharing an apartment, or Lucien Carr, who was in jail. Adams later became the common-law wife of William Burroughs.

Celine Young was Lucien Carr's girlfriend at the time.

Lucien Carr spent the next two years in prison.

Allen Ginsberg had gone to college originally to become a labor lawyer.

The “new vision” was a term that Kerouac and Ginsberg's small group of friends in Morningside Heights used to describe their own philosophy, which they hoped to express through their art. They picked up many of their ideas from Baudelaire's notion of “poet as alchemist,” the Symbolists' attitude of spiritual defiance, and Apollinaire's
l'esprit nouveau,
which pitted “experimental” arts against growing social conformity.

Alfred Adler was a Viennese psychologist who split away from Freud's methods during the early part of the twentieth century.

Lionel Trilling, an author and literary critic, was one of Ginsberg's professors at Columbia.

That summer Kerouac had been hired to work at a summer camp, before finding a job closer to home as a soda jerk.

A reference to the Carr-Kammerer murder, which had taken place one year earlier, on the night of August 13-14, 1944.

PM
was a socialist newspaper published in New York.

Both were fellow Columbia College students.

Prince Myshkin is the central character in
The Idiot
, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
⁷
Raskolnikov and Sonia are characters in
Crime and Punishment
, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Ginsberg included two poems here that can be found reprinted as “The Poet: I” and “The Poet: II” in his
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice
(DaCapo, 2006).

Mark Van Doren was a Columbia professor of English at the time to whom Ginsberg had shown his poem cycles
The Denver Doldrums
and
Dakar Doldrums.

Justin Brierly was a Columbia alumnus from Denver who had recommended that both Hal Chase and Neal Cassady attend Columbia.

Kerouac is referring to a Ginsberg letter of mid-April 1948, which is not included in this volume.

Barbara Hale was Lucien Carr's girlfriend at the time.

Ed White was a fellow Columbia student from Denver and an acquaintance of Neal Cassady.
⁶
Russell Durgin was the student in whose apartment Ginsberg was living at the time.

Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondack mountains, was the home of a famous tuberculosis sanatorium.

Allan Temko was a Columbia classmate of Ginsberg and Kerouac. One of their Denver friends, he later became an architectural critic in San Francisco, and won a Pulitzer prize.

Ginsberg was working for the journal of the Academy of Political Science.

A reference to Oswald Spengler's
Decline of the West.

Tom Livornese was a student friend of Kerouac who knew Vicki Russell and Little Jack Melody. He was also a part-time jazz pianist.

Lennie Tristano was a jazz pianist and composer.

Lucien Carr had spent two years in an Elmira prison in upstate New York after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the death of David Kammerer.

Jinny Baker was a young girlfriend of Kerouac's who appears as Jinny Jones in
On the Road.

Victor Tejeira is described as Victor Villanueva in
On the Road.

Earlier that year Seymour Lawrence, editor of the Harvard literary magazine
Wake,
had turned down “The Death of George Martin,” a section of
The Town and the City.

David Diamond was a New York composer who appeared in Kerouac's
The Subterraneans
as Sylvester Strauss.

Julien Sorel is the protagonist in Stendhal's novel
The Red and the Black.

Carolyn Cassady had rented a house in San Francisco at 160 Alpine Terrace the previous summer while she was pregnant.

Adele Morales was a girlfriend of Kerouac, and later married Norman Mailer.

Richard Weitzner was a friend and fellow Columbia student.

Joe May was a gay friend of Ginsberg's.

Harry Slochower was a professor at Brooklyn College and wrote many books, including
No Voice Is Wholly Lost.

Ginsberg's brother, Eugene Brooks.

Meyer Schapiro was an art historian who taught at Columbia University and the New School.

A reference to a letter that is now missing.

The Dancingmaster was a nickname they gave to Justin Brierly, a reference to his ability to manipulate people.

Kells Elvins was one of Burroughs's oldest and closest friends.

Elbert Lenrow had been planning to take Kerouac and Ginsberg to the Museum of Modern Art to see a screening of Carl Dreyer's film
The Passion of Joan of Arc
before Allen's arrest.

Harry Carman was a dean at Columbia University.

John Hollander was a Columbia classmate of Ginsberg, and became a poet and conservative literary critic.

“Birthday Ode,” written for the birth of Bill Burroughs's son, was later retitled “Surrealist Ode” and published in Ginsberg's
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice
(DaCapo, 2006).

Walter Adams was a classmate of Ginsberg's, and the son of poet Kathrin Traverin Adams.

Albert Schweitzer was a missionary, doctor, and theologian who later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jerry Rauch was one of their Columbia friends.

This is the first mention of Carl Solomon, to whom Ginsberg would address
Howl.

Nightwood,
by Djuna Barnes, was published in 1936.

Alan Harrington was a friend of Kerouac and Holmes who later wrote
The Immortalist.

Kerouac had spent time in a Navy mental hospital in Bethesda during the spring of 1943.

LuAnne Henderson was Neal Cassady's first wife.

Norman Schnall was an early friend of Ginsberg and Kerouac, and is mentioned in the scroll version of
On the Road.

Sebastian Sampas was a childhood friend of Kerouac's who died in combat during World War II.

Neal Cassady was staying with Diana Hansen, and they were splitting their time between her New York apartment and her mother's in Poughkeepsie. They married later that year.

Zagg was one of Kerouac's nicknames from childhood.

The Assyrian and Other Stories,
by William Saroyan.

The Crippled Giant: A Literary Relationship with Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
by Milton Hindus.

Texas, Li'l Darling
is a musical by Johnny Mercer and Robert Emmett Dolan.