Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (53 page)

I realize how right you are, that was the first time I sat down to blow, it came out in your method, sounding like you, an imitation practically. How far advanced you are on this. I don't know what I'm doing with poetry. I need years of isolation and constant everyday writing to attain your volume and freedom and knowledge of the form.

[ . . . ]

We wandered on peyote all downtown, P&I [Peter and I], met Betty Keck and saw Moloch Molochsmoking building in red glare downtown St. Francis Hotel, with robot upstairs eyes and skullface, in smoke, again. And I saw in me and he a void under the knowledged, of each other.

And then did [Meyer] Schapiro recognize you?

Ask Garver if possible to order the mescaline, leave him the Delta Co. address, and bring news, so I can order. One first arrest in California this last month on possession of peyote. Chap in San Mateo. Anonymous hipster, furnished room.

Remember cheap bus with wetbacks crossing desert from West Coast Pan-Am highway (inquire Guaymas, Culiacan or Hermosillo) to very Mexicali, thus cutting out all U.S. travel. Also beautiful busride crost Sierra Madres from Durango to Mazatlan, about sixteen hours each. Mexicali bus connects with main highway at Santa Ana I think.

I have no money but if in bad trouble $$ write immediately and I'll tap Neal or someone, and send instructions where to send it.

Bern Porter or City Lights bookstore here will publish a book of poems for me, possibly also for you, to be investigated. I had a little poem in small magazine in Southern California and my father sent me a copy republished from
NY Herald Tribune
, they do that every Sunday. Strange. Incomprehensible note about “The Shrouded Stranger,” of all things.

One hundred fifty poems?! But I've labored all month putting together twenty little piffles! Fifty pages so far plus
Howl
.

Neal is off the extraboard on a regular job, so can schedule dates and nights.

As I say you have the original manuscript of
Howl
.

Blues samples lovely. I wrote Bill. He not dead. You know (snicker) I cut out truth's etc. lobotomy in new version. We'll talk.

Love

Allen

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to
Jack Kerouac [Mexico City, Mexico]

August 30, 1955

1010 Montgomery
August 30

 

Dear Almond Crackerjax:

[ . . . ]

City Lights bookstore here putting out pamphlets—fifty short pages—of local poets and one of W. C. Williams reprint and one of Cummings and will put out
Howl
(under that title) next year, one booklet for that poem, nothing else—it will fill a booklet.

I move in two days to Berkeley cottage with flowers and quiet. Send more MexCity Blues if you stay long. Regards to Garver. September heat in SF turning milk sour.

Love,

Allen

 

 

Jack Kerouac [Mexico City, Mexico] to
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

September 1-6, 1955

 

Dear Allen:

(Thanks very much for the mad money—now I go mad)

Thou possessor of the tenderest heart and the highest wisdom. If I can ever crawl to your cottage of Blakean Horror in Berkeley (Yak!) and mack the bread-crumbs off your bone, Wak! Lak! The boy lak! Smak! Trak! Shak! Yok! pock—smock—there'll be a lotta typin to be done.

[ . . . ]

I have good news. Mr. Cowley got me Academy of Arts and Letters loot, to tune of 2 C's, which I get in monthly checks of 50 bucks, which I convert into traveler's checks and writ. Also sold “Mexican Girl” to
Paris Review
$50. Have big warm letter from Malcolm [Cowley]—and now he will write foreword for
Beat Generation
for Viking. I'm driving myself crazy Miss Greening. I don't know what I'm doing or where I am.

Need a typewriter, need friendship of you.

[ . . . ]

Friday Sept. 2.
Threw green down the toilet, getting ready to visit you. No mescaline, man got arrested on the border with mescaline last week.—Want to get there.

My legs are very bad again, penicillin didn't work with Miss Green.

Holmes wrote me.—Also, publishers of Suzuki in N.Y. (Philos. Library) wanted me to guarantee 600 copies before publishing my “very well written” Buddha-book. I don't know no 600 people with $3.50. Will change title to
Wake Up.

Saturday.
Miss Green again, hard girl. Will leave one week from today, take train to Santa Ana, bus to Mexicali, bum to LA, Zipper to Frisco. Will come back for winter in Acapulco-district grass-hut, when we finish our talks in Berkeley and I have done some work and some roaming around Frisco. No typewriter, no imagination, I apologize for my poor quivering meat.

Afternoon
—Now I'm drinking whisky like Lucien and flipping. I am
bored
. Garver talks but not to me. Wish Bill B. was here for old-time charm kicks at Mexico. He hasn't answered my letter of Aug. 30, written with Garver. If he got disemboweled by Berbers at Ouedzen I say he deserves it for snooping around and in Eternity for surreptitious mutilation of cats.
¹¹³
I can just see him being tipped over by non-committal disinterested Nomads and sliced nonchalantly as the afternoon drones on . . . Bill is saying “What? Wait? Where?” and he suddenly is face to face with his romance, a Arab hatchet.

If so, it means I will come face to face with
my
romance, sheeps in heaven.

See you between the 16th and 23rd of September, though by now you don't believe me any more.

Jockolio

 

Leaving Friday—can't wait to see you.

[ . . . ]

Editors' Note:
In September 1955, Kerouac arrived at Ginsberg's Berkeley cottage door. At the very moment he was waiting for Allen to come home, Allen was meeting Gary Snyder for the first time and making arrangements for the Six Gallery poetry reading. Jack attended the reading , on October 7, but was too shy to read. Allen, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure read and Kenneth Rexroth acted as the master of ceremonies for the evening. In October, Gary and Jack went on a weekend camping trip that served as the basis for
The Dharma Bums.
Then in November, Natalie Jackson committed suicide while Jack was supposed to be keeping an eye on her for Neal. Both men were shaken by her death and Neal returned to live with Carolyn in Los Gatos. After a short visit with the Cassadys at the end of November, Kerouac eagerly returned to his mother who was living in Rocky Mount with Jack's sister and brother-in-law. For the next few months, Jack remained in North Carolina working on several books, including
Visions of Gerard.

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Berkeley, California] to
Jack Kerouac [Rocky Mount, North Carolina]

1624 Milvia St.
Berkeley, Cal.
March 10, 1955 [
sic
: 1956]

 

Dear Jack:

Enclosed find letter from John Holmes. I'll write him too. Enclosed also find the letter from Jonathan Williams
¹¹⁴
I mentioned before. I have some notes I once showed you which I wrote in NYC which I will send him. I thought also to summarize Bill's
Naked Lunch
and send a sample of Bill's routines. Jonathan Williams' letter is what it is.
Black Mountain Review
is run by Charles Olson (poet whose poem about hairy table I showed you in bookstore in Berkeley). Robert Duncan is now in N.C. also, teaching at Black Mountain [College], which apparently has a crazy hip crowd. I wrote Williams telling him you were in N.C. too, suggesting Duncan look you up, since he read
Visions of Neal
.

W.C. Williams apparently either never received or read neither your prose which I sent him nor a subsequent letter from me enclosing
Howl
for him to read. He wrote City Lights he would write an introduction if I sent him the manuscript I haven't heard from him directly. I sent him another copy of
Howl
, and will inquire what happened to your prose later.

Cowley was in town, I spoke to him briefly, he didn't remember me, then we got into an argument about Burroughs—“Keep away from him,” he said “I understand he killed his wife.” He mentioned
On the Road
, saying it would take time and was hung-up on the libel matter. Apparently they are all ballooned seriously on that issue. I didn't like Cowley this time.

Lucien wrote: “Jack stayed here coupla days. Seemed quite cheery. Thought his stuff about brother Gerard quite excellent also. Glad to see you both on a less obscurantist, obfuscating kick. Also enjoyed his story in
Paris Review
.” . . . “I was made Night Bureau Manager recently which I guess means I'm white, if poverty stricken.”

Orlovsky moved into big happy modern housing project, gave Lafcadio peyote and got him laid. LaVigne having big shows of spontaneous drawings at The Place and City Lights bookstore. I had a big dream last night that Neal moved into my old neighborhood in Paterson. I'm working lugging baggage at Greyhound Station in SF, $13 a day, and applied at MSTS and MCS for ship, hope to get one inside two months.

Snyder living with [Locke] McCorkle at Mill Valley, [Philip] Whalen comes over for supper a few times a week, I stay in town at Peter's a few nites a week when working. Revised Moloch which is now three pages long—“Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo,” etc.

See you in Time,

Love

Allen

 

 

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [USNS
Joseph F. Merrell,
San Francisco,
California] to Jack Kerouac [Mill Valley, California]

ca
. late May 1956

Allen Ginsberg, Yeoman
USNS Joseph F. Merrell
TAKV-4
c/o Fleet P.O. S.F., Cal.

Jack:

Enclosed $20.00 ten I owe you ten because I'm rich. If you need any more for north-ward trip let me know.

Received proofs on my book [
Howl and Other Poems
] and Ferlinghetti asked for extra poems to include so I sent him Holy! etc. and a new four page Greyhound poem you haven't seen yet. I leave 16th St. and 3rd shipyards pier 64 Triple A, on the 4th June to go to Oakland Supply Army Base, and sail on the 8th for Hawaii, then up to Seattle I think and then to Arctic. I maybe in Seattle till the end of June with weekends off so I'll hire a helicopter to visit Desolation Peak.

Several letters from Bill [Burroughs] in Berkeley I haven't seen yet. Eugene my brother had a baby boy named Alan Eugene Brooks. I didn't realize he loved me so.

I guess I'll see you before I leave, may in fact come out this weekend to Mill Valley. I gave Burroughs' Yage City to [Robert] Creeley.

Needle
man won't print “Railroad Earth”—the young Italian Zoot Suit anarchists who support him think it's not political anarchism, and they pay him to publish latter. He says he's sorry. I saw him at Creeley reading.

I sent copies of
Howl
to T.S. Eliot, [Ezra] Pound, [William] Faulkner, [Mark] Van Doren, Meyer Schapiro, [Richard] Eberhart, [Lionel] Trilling, till they were exhausted (the copies). I wonder what T.S. Eliot will do. I wrote them each about you too. Funny letters to each. Imagine to T.S. Eliot.

I have a headache and am wandering around S.F. Friday afternoon with money and briefcase and poems and leather jacket and khaki shirt and pants and haircut with nothing to do. Stopped here in the Chinese Post Office by the Chinatown park.

What happened with Neal—you spent two-three days?

Love,

Allen

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [USNS
Sgt. Jack J. Pendleton
, Point Barrow,
Alaska] to Jack Kerouac [n.p., Desolation Peak, Washington?]

August 12-18, 1956

August 12, 1956

 

Dear Jack:

[ . . . ]

So have been up and down north coast of Alaska for a month, now at northern-most Point Barrow. Sun is out all night or was in midsummer last week, dread ghastly pallor all nite thru clouds, and this week fantastic burning iron sun going down at edge of horizon every nite for a few hours, clear weather. The water always moving clouds always moving, birds same clouds and me same like a transparent shifting haze everywhere changing. I spend a lot of time at the prow at nite, often on my knees, praying, but don't know to who or what. I thought of you and wanted to write but didn't know what to say, what you would find acceptable, and still feel ill at ease. I thought of writing you huge envy-worry-love confession but the sun's in my eye and why bother you. And Gregory Corso is in S.F. heard so from Whalen and then got a short crazy letter from him—so sharp—.