Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (20 page)

Leave word with [Carl] Solomon or someone accessible where you will be this weekend. I will try to be around.

I turned to write you in respite from the ugliness of the last days, archangel.

Love,

Allen

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [New York, New York]

ca
. February 1950

Sunday Night

 

Dear Jack:

I went home, and after settling all practical matters and putting others off, I sat down and read your book [
The Town and the City
] through on Saturday—from about 10-1:30 and then 3-2 at night.

First things first (or easiest things to speak of first) I was overly pessimistic before about Giroux's effect. The book is definitely helped in some very important ways—two principally:

On the other hand (to speak negatively for a moment) I think it is unfortunate that many beautiful and sometimes necessary solo flights were eliminated. I mean:

I can't remember of course what has been taken out and number 1 and 4 are only slight changes of rhetoric (sentences or paragraphs) but the elimination of 5 is unfortunate to my eyes. I will speak of that presently. The New York scene is excellently compact now but it lacks focus on the immediate moment of tragic crises—you don't see the death of Waldo, and loses some of the impact—it seems less important than I think it is (unless you want to eliminate the whole wood sub-plot and make it an incidental scene). I wish the shuddering blind man and Palmyra Towers were still there. The way it is now you don't really feel that Kenny is inwardly as tied up with Waldo (spiritually) as he really is.

I also seem to remember a beautiful panoramic description of a truck drive thru the west which I was looking for and is gone—Joe.

As I always said (before) I felt that you gave Francis too little nobility at times. In the beginning and through most of the scenes (especially the figure in the dark perch) he has great dignity. I wish he (and maybe Wilfred Engles) were greater men at parties, or do you really mean he is all dried up? But the light of comprehension was shining most strongly in his late arrival at the funeral and the rippling waves of the 3 ladies. So that he is left a little unfinished at the end—and he is one of the most beautiful characters too.

But to conclude this speech about surface—I think Giroux is definitely O.K. and I'm sorry that I mistrusted him. Further if you want my (prophetic) opinion—it's a truly great book deserving of a great response and I am pretty sure that it will make a big stir and get singing reviews. I think that it will swing in every way, swinging I mean. Furthermore if anybody gets nasty call me in and I'll challenge him to a duel—you have nothing to be humiliated about in any way, it would be crass perversity to dislike your work (and you).

Now I will answer your letter, which I avoided doing. Angel, you amaze me. (I must tell you I am inconsiderate and impercipient.) The first time I read your book I cried because your sense of the world was so beautiful—but not merely that—really rock bottom true, and ultra bony there, real and with the quality of gentleness, tenderness, care, selflessness and experience and the wisdom of life which there can be—which makes me cry whenever someone shows me it. But I always fall back to careful slothful levels and underestimate you even at the moments when I seek you most—and to find in you such sweet expressive-ness again shakes tears out of my Hebrew face. I am made of the same gentle stuff as thee—I know you and I know again that you know me.

Perhaps it is true that knowledge is not known day to day but only in lifetimes or art eternities but I am grateful for your forbearance if such it is until our eyes meet again in your laborious work.

I know your power full well in your work and I am amazed that it is so clear and ripe “concluded” (your art is conclusive)—amazed past envy (at moments) into tears or (not so much awe) but revelatory wonder. You teach me over about the Lamb. I only wish I knew how to meet you in the present light of our soul daily and show back openly some part of the peace I bare thee sometime when I read thee right.

I know you are honest but I never realized how sincere you are. Your book continues and concludes with final sincere self-statements (not horrible revelations but peaceful) that exhaust possibility—the real thing, if I may use a Huncke and turn a maudlin phrase.

I wish we could show our true face more often. I don't want to say any more because you know how I feel. I don't want to be rhetorical (though through images I may summon up a Flash of the Shepherd). I hate to short change you by losing sight of you in an abstract ecstasy of our funeral or whatever life is. [Sentence washed out by water.] Just the same I hate to lose the opportunity to pitch a little woo.

As a result of your book I was able to see Neal more closely today and we were more than gravely polite to each other tonight and I brought Varda up to Diana's for an hour for him to meet.

Isn't everything really complete, though?

Well, Zagg,
⁵⁷
I guess I'll close now because I have to go to bed.

I am going if possible to see Schapiro sometime Thursday afternoon; and then to Neal's lot that night to show him the paintings. Get in touch with me somehow this week so I can call you up and tell you what exact arrangements have been made for Meyer Schapiro—through Holmes? C. Solomon is going away for a week.

Also I expect to see Lenrow (to return a book and perhaps have supper) Friday afternoon, if you would enjoy seeing him then call him.

I would like to write prose and may soon. Still afraid of work, but might also write a longer “Shroudy Stranger” poem with embalmess and ecstasy of unreals and corruption, visions of the Booder [Buddha], ghost tidings, window's aglory, pigs asses, dungeons of the lamb, dark shaggy things of the sea, the monstrous lights of the Sahara, and tears out of my Hebrew face and gas.

O Tears out of my Hebrew face.

Allen

 

P.S. Also your poem is comprehensible now.

I was jealous of Neal's blood-brotherhood.

 

 

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

Paterson February 24, '49 [
sic
: 1950]

 

Because I left the hospital today and carried my belongings directly to Paterson, I will not see you this week, and so am writing.

I received a letter from Giroux sent Feb. 17. He tried unsuccessfully to peddle my poems, and said that he went out of his way to do it because he liked them. He does not think the book is publishable yet, and in addition thinks that my private idiom needs a channel to the public through magazines first; and suggests prose, which he will look at, to make a name first. Half page letter, concluding with presentation of Saroyan's
Assyrian
,
⁵⁸
signed Bob. I went to the office and picked up my material, and also stole a copy of
Cocktail Party
[by T. S. Eliot] (the world owes me at least that $3 worth of heart balm). He also suggested I try
Poetry
magazine (now edited by one Karl Schapiro). I saw Van Doren briefly, told him the results, said I would try
Poetry
(once again, as they rejected poems this year already), and asked him to intercede with
Partisan
. It seems so far that I have not been able to make any magazine, which is not right. I will be surprised if I can't place anything at all that way in the next year at least. I do not know if this situation has anything to do with the lack of drive I have to work. But no more complaints, I don't find that publishing has the same glory that it once had when I wanted to be supreme.

I am in Paterson and I move into the house tomorrow. As soon as I am settled and the weather looks to be warm, come out. I will be in N.Y. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday morning for the next months to see my doctor. I can see you around 1:30 Thursday anywhere. Send postcard to my new address which is 416 East 34 Street, Paterson.

A turning point has been reached in that I am not going to have anymore homosexual affairs anymore: my will is free enough now to put this in writing as a final statement.

Verne [Neal Cassady] seems a little pathetic and dizzy from time to time as I visit him at Diana's. I had to get back home one night this week, and he refused to say goodbye or understand that I wanted to go but kept on reading me passages and pages of Hindus-Céline
⁵⁹
past my pumpkin hour; and then when I forced the issue by interrupting him to apologize and say goodbye he accused me (jokingly) of wasting time. (Time, he meant by that, I should be out the door instead of explaining that I was sorry that I had to interrupt) Ah. But the monomaniacal, almost purposeful (on purpose) way in which, though he knew I had to go by the minute, he just kept reading to me, irritated me. Sheer perversion. He was trying to formulate some tender communion other than this attritive imposition; that is his trouble. He doesn't know what he is doing. I am annoyed by his insistence that he does: he thinks so because he has built a wall of mental plans. You can hardly get a word or a look in edgewise, the way he juggles Time to keep it from settling. I know this because I know from feeling-sight, as well as from the fact that when he is cool or not on edge, on some good days, he is altogether different. But there is so much invisible burden of the past on his mind that he seldom can escape. Verne is very young in spirit.

I will not speak of my creative plans (which are beginning to bud again). I am going to write non-metrical poetry for a while, I think. I have learned enough about surface. Is
The Gates Of Wrath
a good short novel title? Or is it like Steinbeck?

Do you find me distant or frigid of sentiment lately? I'm not, I assure you, Jean. Not toward Verne, either.

The American myth of Wolfe and power and pathos is changing in this decade. What is happening I realized this week, reading Wolfe's credo, is that we are nearer to the edge of inevitable social transformation that are going to affect us in thought and sense: for one thing, do you realize how much nearer the alignment of east against west has become, especially since English sway in elections? If we could carry this off, it were different; but I feel in my bones that we are not really the world-spirit-power, but that Russia is actually stronger, militarily already, potentially more overwhelming, perhaps even in her myths now, and I think that Wolfe's “lost” America may be reduced to the pathetic status of self-deception. We are used to thinking of ourselves in sophisticated life and fortune power thoughts, but it may actually be that we are swollen with pitiful pride and history will bypass us (even me and you) in the next half century. We will become a sort of greater Spain, or Portugal. Dig? And not merely
Life
magazine myth, that is just the false formal consciousness of America—but pioneer America will not have the significance that it once had. Did you see the subway ads for
Texas, Li'l Darling
?
⁶⁰
It looks like a decadent capitalist satire in crude form out of Russian propaganda magazine, satirizing chauvinistic Americans machine enthusiasms. Nobody here is (Paterson) aware that anything might happen—depression, war—to shake up the U.S. again from top to bottom. Nobody knows seriousness outside of self.

These are random thoughts of the moment. Don't know if they mean anything. Might however be prophecy about real time.

400,000 unemployed in N.Y. on relief.

Stepmother thinks your book (half read) is much better than most novels.

Allen of Paterson

 

 

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

ca
. March 1950

 

Dear Jack:

Missed you last Thursday. How was Lowell? Well, it is now arranged that you make your literary debut (in the little mag. that is) in
Neurotica
in the same issue as me. I went down on my knees (practically: took me days to recover from the fury) to Landesman
⁶¹
to get him to publish “Pull My Daisy.” He finally agreed but I had to chop the poem down to half its size so he could squeeze it in; it still looks good. I did that on the basis of my service to him by recommending [Carl] Solomon to his attention. I ran back and forth and Carl turned out a great hip-cool essay on insulin and madness and hospital and sanity.
⁶²
Landesman and [John Clellon] Holmes read it and agree its probably the best article they ever printed. It too will be with our issue. Make sure, incidentally, that you do give them your work, so that everything will not be anticlimactic in my eyes. I was so pleased by Carl's success (Landesman, college Joe himself, thinks that Carl is a great new discovery) that I ran to Neal and started him off on an article on car stealing, hoping that some small achievement of his might give everybody a shot in the arm; also for sentiment. Well, he was pleased like little boy (his better nature) at so much responsibility. I make it a point to cut in at 75 St.
⁶³
early Monday and Thursday morning (8:30) for two hours before going uptown to my Doc.