Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (10 page)

Allen

 

 

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

ca.
December 1948

 

Dear Jack:

I have moved to 1401 York Ave.—3 flights up to the back, left side. (That is at 74th St. east of 1st Ave.) My last weeks in Harlem were very bad but also baffling (everything is bad and baffling now.) Huncke moved in, yakked at me irritably for a week and a half, ate my food, took my last nickel, and walked off with my last suits, a jacket, Russell [Durgin]'s winter clothes (suits, coats, etc.) and twenty or thirty expensive books—(hundreds of dollars worth of books) full of theological notes. Nor have I [a] typewriter any longer as you knew. I will have to pay Russell for all of this, don't you see. Huncke sent a letter to him a few days later to notify Russell that he was aware of his sins and would someday (perhaps in the month) “try to make it up as soon as he regains his fortunes”—much like the old retired army captain lush in
The Idiot
.

I was repaid by God however because a man left me his apartment, $13 a month cold water, 3 rooms fastidiously furnished (one of them is).

Don't stay away because you think I don't want to see you. Don't think ill of me.

Lucien and I had a long conversation the other night. I explained my new Faith (you can call it) first in terms of
Cezanne
(which he bought) but as I went deeper and deeper and approached my own central point he listened responsively. He told me that he thought I was mad. My father thinks I should see a psychiatrist. You think I am getting ugly (same thing?) (Bill understood everything I said but he did not have the experience to be with me, and he wished me luck.) Leaving Bill out, perhaps—assuming I am mad (Ha!) god, how I must have suffered, to go mad. And all the time I was calling to people to save me and no one put out his hand and held it. This is like suicide, only I am alive and looking out of this living death I can
see
the people weep and feel sorry. Alas, nobody even weeps. It's all a dream.

Love,

Allen

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

ca.
December 1948

 

Dear Jack:

Have we been in touch with each other? I heard from W. [Walter] Adams through someone else that you asked for my address. It is, as I wrote you (did you receive my letter?) 1401 York Ave., third floor back.

My circle or at least one more cycle is complete. I have returned to Paterson to live—for the while. I look at this as semi eternal, that is, it really marks the closure of some kind of gyre, five years in the running. What really made it complete (that is about all that it did) was that I finally went to bed with Lucien. I will speak to you of it when I see you. The earth did not turn over in its grave, but another sphere did open. We always wonder at these levels and levels, cycle after cycle. You see them as
life
, and complete and beautiful in themselves. I think sometimes that that is enough, since I understand that beauty, although not with the ripeness and humility that you do. For me however, there is something else, a supreme cycle of which all these are a part—a single real (actual) (literal) (practical) vision of which all new visions are the shadow. The shadows get lighter and lighter with me, my understanding comes nearer and nearer to final knowledge. Veil after veil is removed—by our action in removing it, too. My consciousness interposes itself between my soul and the world, and makes a part of me unreal and perhaps that is the ugliness you spoke of. Someday, I will have destroyed this consciousness, and will be myself. I am most myself lately I think, too. But I always have kept saying this. Once I was convinced that I was wrong. But I have been right—as far as I am concerned. I know that now too well to question. But even such stories as this that I am telling I will cease to tell, as until you will have nothing more to object to, and everything to love. I mean my consciousness won't get in the way.

My school has as usual been giving me trouble. I flunked a course in Victorian literature [summer 1948] because I wrote an exam on the dead authors based on a living idea of eternity. Teacher said it was “Pretentious generalization.” I guess it really was, too, but what is one to do on that score?

And you? I haven't been talking to you all this time, I know. I wish I already had your humble courtesy. You are a pot of gold, don't think I don't realize it. Lawrence
²⁹
rejected your novel because of reasons of security. Well, don't despair, we are on the right track. It's too bad our problems are not solved more easily. But that is an old stupid complaint. Still the others are stupid. It is as if to save ourselves we had to save them too. That is why genius must suffer—it has to bear the burdens of the whole world. Our happiness and reality depends on the happiness and reality of others. Remember Rimbaud's remark when he said that some day he would have to leave Verlaine and help others? Dear soul, that's not a very tasty proposition. My humor is getting senile—that is because my wit is tired and irrelevant, not because it is vague in itself. Well, as I was saying, maybe if you have to be refused by them you will have to break down even more, break down another defense, break down the falseness of your rhetoric. Dear soul, it's not a very tasty proposition. The soul must speak, you must speak out directly, not through literary symbols like “Brooding.”
You must assume every responsibility in the novel that evades you.
Total, total, no superfluity. But you sense the superfluity so completely that the situation is sad. I think you are right to put off the decision to the next novel. This one is good enough. The only trouble practical is with the world. Well, this is where the trouble starts for you, I guess, the real trouble, with your art. The only thing is to look that directly in the face. The world will force you to, and that is good, unless you weaken and take to rage and illusion. I am really talking to myself, not to you. These are my decisions that I'm speaking of I guess and projecting them to you. How true they are for you I don't know. But you are certainly advanced beyond my comprehension, when I try to comprehend or “help” in a sacerdotal way, etc. etc.

I want to see you. I feel more and more at home with you now actually than ever before, I feel you more, actually more clarity, more confidence, more trust. I will be in Paterson for several weeks. Will you come in, at last?

 

 

Jack Kerouac [n.p., North Carolina?] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]

ca.
December 16, 1948

 

Allen:

I am aware that Reginald Marsh, and his cool change from tense faults and naturalism, to God's-eye view of man in the God-real world, is great. (SPOKEN IN A DEEP VOICE.)

Not screaming over the telephone—you and Barbara [Hale] are queers.

You ought to go to the Rehn Gallery and dig “New Gardens.”

Do you know what I think?—People in this century have been looking at people with a naturalistic eye, and this is the cause of all the trouble. I think women are beautiful goddesses and I always want to lay them—Joan [Adams], Barbara, all—and I think men are beautiful Gods including me, and I always want to put my arm around them as we walk somewhere.

Last night I wrote an apocalyptic letter to [Allan] Temko and I made a copy of it to show to you and maybe [John Clellon] Holmes. It is full of “frightening” and inescapable predictions, scatalogically smeared with an evil leer sometimes, much as “old me, old spontaneous me” is that way. All truthful words are that way . . . “Snake Hill was so-called for a very real, snaky reason.” “If that's the case, then I am glad that shadow changes into bone.”

I said to Temko—“When we get out of the narrow ‘white light' of our surface rationality—when we get out of the room—we will see that mystic makes no mud.”

However, I hate you. Because years ago you and Burrows [Burroughs] used to laugh at me because I saw people as godlike, and even, as a husky football man, walked around godlike like, and Hal [Chase] did that too, and still does. We long ago realized our flesh happily, while you and Bill used to sit under white lamps talking and leering at each other. I think you are full of shit, Allen, and at last I am going to tell you. You are like David Diamond
³⁰
—you confused your claw with the hand of a godly man; you confused affection. I am sick of you, I want you to change: why don't you die, give up, go mad, for once.

I have decided that I am dead, given up, gone mad. Thus I speak to you freely. I don't care any more. I may get married soon, too—to Pauline maybe. We'll run away. I am on the verge now of loving my geekish guilty-flesh self—thus reverting to the original sanity of the Hal-days. The reason why I always dream of torturing and murdering Bill (as last night) is because he made me geekish in the name of something else. However, I wrote a big letter to Bill and am sending him Tea Party. I am lost. The only thing to do is to give up—I am giving up.

Thinking of getting a job in a gas station, I shudder as before. I'm lost. If my book doesn't sell, what can I do? As I write this to you I am on the verge of falling dead from my chair. Just now I felt myself swooning. It is too much, too close to death, life. I must learn to accept the tightrope.

Do you know what Hal does? Like Julien Sorel,
³¹
the moment he enters a seminary, he says to himself, “There are 383 seminarists in here, or rather, 383 e-ne-mies . . .” The only seminarist who befriends him is, therefore, “of the 383 enemies the one and greatest enemy.” I think Hal is full of shit.

I am full of shit too. Don't you see? we're ALL full of shit, and therefore we can be saved.

In the picture on the beach there is a man embracing a woman front-wise, naked, and this is all I want to do—nothing else. So please don't bother me with your verbiage. Write me a big verbal letter. I don't believe anything I say.

However, I believe in love. I love Ray Smith. I also love Pauline, my mother, Lucien (in a way), Bill and you (in a way), little children, and finally I love everything about little children. Goombye. Chinaman.

There is a false note throughout this letter that hides from you the real me, which is simply the madman-child I am . . . and forgive me for saying you are full of shit, in fact. I don't know what to think or say, Allen, and so it begins . . . that is, why think? why say? let me just be. You were right sending me the picture. Let us be gods saying nothing much, just standing like the two men on the beach looking at the ocean. There is too much talk nowadays, isn't there? Yet you and Neal hate me for not-talking and for “dignity” as you called it. ah, well, ah, well, ah, well, ah, well, ah, well, ah ah ah

I don't have to tell you what I believe, because you don't believe in belief, and neither do I, but I do believe . . . (I really do).

I believe in shelter from the cold, and good food, and drinks, and many women all around, the interplay of the sexes, and much happy meaningless talk, and tales, and books, and Dickensy joy. I even believe in your existence. I believe that soon we will all die, go mad, give up, drop off. I believe in children and everything (see how false that sentence?) I believe that when I talk to you I feel I have to be false. Thus the hysteria of the subway. I used to be more truthful to you when I used to glare at you and call you names. Now I pretend to believe like you and to be like you. I don't.

I believe that I have to continually remind you of my love for women and children only because I feel (perhaps inaccurately) that you hate women and children. I believe (perhaps wrongly) that you are a cosmic queer and hate everything but men, and hate men, therefore, the most, and hate me the most (as you hate Neal, how you must hate Neal.) I believe in shelter from the cold. I have rages, too, and hang up from the phone and will continue to do so. Barbara and I are lions, we meet at the watering-place of the lions and don't notice the fawns, the giraffes ([Alan] Harrington) or the weasels ([John Clellon] Holmes) or the panda bears (Marian [Holmes])—or the cardinal birds ([Alan] Wood-Thomas) or the cats. bla bla bla bla bla. This is all hysteria and I wonder why I have to be hysterical with you, when I used to be old-brotherish. You see how honest-dishonest I am? You see how good-bad the world? You see how we must shelter ourselves from the cold-warmth?

Finally, when we're all honest, we will cut down our sentences as above and end up saying nothing. With our new deep voices we will simply say—“mooo.” or “shmooo.” or “beeee”—or “faaaa.” and we'll all know. And our belief will have become us. Then everybody will walk around gravely like gods—like in the picture, you see. The two gods looking at the sea will say, “Beeee.” The other will say, “Roooo.” And the man facing the woman will say, “Geeee.” and she'll say—“Chaaaaa.” And food will taste more delicious than now, orgasms will last longer, warmth will be sweeter, children won't cry, fruit will grow quicker. Finally, out of his mind, God himself will appear and have to admit that we did it alright alright.

Excuse me again for trying to be mad . . . Roooo . . . like you; I am your crazy pal.

Now that I have more or less settled that, and expressed my appreciation of our new life and regard for each other, let me go on to the next “great” thing: (you see, I used “beautiful” and “great” only in quotes now to show you I am conscious of our former hypocrisy)—