Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (83 page)

Jay Landesman, the editor of
Neurotica,
published their collaborative poem under Ginsberg's name with the title “Song: Fie My Fum” in the spring 1950 issue.

Carl Solomon's piece also appeared in the spring 1950 issue of
Neurotica
under the pseudonym Carl Goy.

Diana Hansen's apartment, where Neal Cassady was staying, was on 75th Street in Manhattan.

Jack Fitzgerald was a classmate of Ginsberg's at Columbia and a jazz aficionado.

Philip Lamantia was one of the poets who read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955.

Solomon, working at Ace Books for his uncle, A. A. Wyn, gave Kerouac a contract for
On the Road,
offering him a $1,000 advance, but Kerouac never signed it.

Alan Ansen was a friend and poet, at one time working as W. H. Auden's secretary.

Gregory Corso became one of the leading poets of the Beat Generation.

Adler Place was a popular neighborhood bar in North Beach, San Francisco.

James Laughlin was the owner and publisher of New Directions Books.

Bill Garver was a small-time thief and drug dealer befriended by Burroughs.

The Manhattan House of Detention in lower Manhattan was commonly referred to as “The Tombs.”

Henri Cru was a classmate and friend of Kerouac's at Horace Mann who appeared as Remi Boncoeur in
On the Road
.

John Hoffman was a poet who died in Mexico in 1952 at the age of 24.

VVV
was a magazine of Surrealist writing, published from 1942 to 1944.

Gene Pippin was a Columbia classmate.

Sara Yokley was a girlfriend of Kerouac's.

Cassady had struck LuAnne Henderson on the head and injured his thumb. It became infected, and a portion was amputated.

In 1949, Kerouac had hoped to join a group of his Denver friends—Ed White, Bob Burford, Allan Temko, and others—who were all living in Paris

Jaime de Angulo was an author and expert in anthropology and Native American culture.

Martha Gellhorn was a novelist and war correspondent, and was married to Ernest Hemingway.

Kerouac was trying to avoid Joan Haverty, his second wife, during this period.

Dave Tercerero was Burroughs's friend and drug connection in Mexico City.

Dick Davalos was a friend and actor with whom Ginsberg had a brief affair.

At the time Kerouac was calling this manuscript
On the Road,
but it was later published as part of
Visions of Cody
.

Barry Ulanov was a jazz critic and an early supporter of bebop.

Only one letter is included in this volume: the letter dated February 19, 1953, on page 189.

Martha Foley was the editor of
Story
magazine.

Malcolm Cowley, American writer, editor, and critic. An editorial consultant to the Viking Press, his support of
On the Road
was instrumental to its publication.

Bob Merims was an engineer and friend of Lucien Carr.

Alan Eager was a jazz musician whom Ginsberg and Kerouac knew from New York.

Paul Rotha was a British documentary filmmaker and critic.

Jerry Newman owned Esoteric Records and taped Kerouac reading his work. He appeared as Danny Richman in
Visions of Cody.

The Cassadys had discovered the teachings of the American mystic Edgar Cayce.

Karen Horney was a psychologist and the author of
Our Inner Conflicts.

Chester Kallman was a companion of W. H. Auden.

Kenneth Rexroth was an influential poet and writer who lived in San Francisco.

Buddhism in Translations,
by Henry Clarke Warren.

Stanley Gould worked for A. A. Wyn and was the model for “Portrait of a Hipster,” by Anatole Broyard.

Marcel Proust's patron was Baron de Charlus.

An arhat is a Buddhist monk who has attained Nirvana.

This peyote vision was the original inspiration for Ginsberg's poem
Howl.

Cassady's epic, 13,000-word “Joan Anderson Letter” was written in December 1950. In it Neal described a brief affair he had, in a narrative style that profoundly altered both Kerouac's and Ginsberg's methods of writing. The letter was later lost, but segments were used as the basis for
The First Third,
Neal's autobiography and only book.

In his September 5, 1954, letter, Ginsberg told Kerouac that he had shown Robert Duncan a copy of
Essentials of Spontaneous Prose
. Kerouac was afraid Duncan might steal his ideas.

Kerouac suffered from a debilitating form of phlebitis.

On May 3rd Kerouac had sent a postcard saying, “Please send all the manuscripts to me care of this address soon as convenient . . . Giroux has asked to see my B-works and so I want all my manuscripts now.”

“Dream Record: June 8, 1955.”

Keith Jennison was an editor at the Viking Press, who, with Malcolm Cowley's support, convinced the house to buy
On the Road.

Peter Orlovsky hitchhiked to New York in order to pick up his teenage brother Lafcadio. Their mother was on the verge of committing the mentally handicapped boy to a mental institution.

Mark Schorer was a professor at UC Berkeley who later would testify in the trial of
Howl
in support of City Lights.

“Aich” meaning H, slang for heroin.

It was Kerouac who had suggested that
Howl
would be a good title for Ginsberg's poem. Allen had earlier called it
Strophes
.

For a while, Burroughs took pleasure in torturing cats, but in his later years he became a devoted cat lover.

Jonathan Williams was the owner of Jargon Press.

Ginsberg's mother, Naomi, had unexpectedly left him $1,000 in her will.

Life
magazine planned to do an article on the San Francisco Renaissance.

Thomas Parkinson was a professor at UC Berkeley and the editor of
A Casebook On The Beat
, one of the early Beat anthologies.

Gui was Jaime de Angulo's daughter.

Ruth Witt-Diamant was a patroness of the arts and the founder of the San Francisco Poetry Center.

Mademoiselle
was featuring the Beat Generation in an illustrated article and Kerouac posed for his picture with a crucifix around his neck, which caused some controversy.

Ginsberg's book
Howl and Other Poems
was seized by the San Francisco Customs Inspector when it arrived from the British printer. Later in May, the case against the publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was dropped after Ferlinghetti decided to order a second printing of the book made in the U.S. to circumvent the jurisdiction of the customs agents. This strategy worked until June, when the San Francisco Police Department arrested Ferlinghetti for publishing and selling obscene material.

Robert MacGregor was the managing editor at New Directions.

Orlovsky was receiving monthly veteran disability checks due to his medical discharge from the Army.

Pavel Smerdyakov is one of the characters in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel
The Brothers Karamazov.

Panama Street was a well-known area of prostitutes and brothels in Mexico City.

Ginsberg continued this letter for several pages, giving Kerouac a complete rundown of his trip through Spain and France. He wrote extensively about European and Indian trips, but because Jack never responded to the specifics of these letters, the editors have not included them in this volume. This particular letter can be found reproduced in toto in
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg
(DaCapo, 2008), pp. 158-168.

Gilbert Millstein's glowing review of
On the Road
in the
New York Times
made it a best seller and launched Kerouac's career.

Ernest von Hartz was Lucien Carr's father-in-law.

KiKi was a young boyfriend of William Burroughs in Tangier.

Beat Generation
was published in 2005.

The Mistral Bookshop was owned by George Whitman, an old friend of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

This is a reference to the poet Ray Bremser, who was in this New Jersey jail at the time.

John Foster Dulles was the U.S. secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Garens was Ginsberg's nickname for Snyder.

Jay Landesman owned a nightclub in St. Louis, which offered poetry readings as well as more traditional entertainment.

The Five Spot was a jazz club on the Bowery.

Connie was Al Sublette's wife.

Irving Rosenthal was an editor for the
Chicago Review.

These are references to several anthology projects Ginsberg had proposed to Kerouac.

Robert Lowry was an editor and novelist who wrote reviews for
The Saturday Review.

Léon Robinson was a character in L. F. Céline's first novel,
Journey to the End of Night.

Ginsberg was annoyed that the first portion of his review of
The Dharma Bums
appeared in the November 12, 1958, issue of the
Village Voice
farther back in the newspaper than the second portion.

Patricia McManus was the publicity director at Viking Press.

Johnny Nicholson was a wealthy restaurateur and friend of Kerouac's.

Kerouac had been asked by Avon to edit a book of contemporary poetry. Although he worked on it and mentioned it in the next few letters, it was never published.

Ginsberg volunteered to take part in experiments to study the effects of LSD on the human brain. It was to be his first exposure to the drug.

Capote had dismissed Kerouac's work, saying, “That's not writing, it's typing.”

Marc Schleifer was the editor for
Kulchur
magazine.

Paul Carroll was one of the founders of
Big Table
magazine in Chicago.

Bickford's was a cafeteria on Times Square where Ginsberg washed dishes and many of his friends hung out.

Karl Paetel was the editor of
Beat, Eine Anthologie.

An article by Joan Haverty, describing Kerouac as a deadbeat dad, had just appeared in
Confidential
magazine.