Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

by Jack Kerouac

  But all our thoughts (even Denison’s though he doesn’t know it) meet in heaven. But I really don’t agree with the editor anymore.

  Now enough of this—and I will tell you tales of the madhouse—facts, anecdotes, stories, descriptions. I have tried to answer your real question of your whole letter, the last sentence—“Hey? What is it that finds you there?” Something that I am learning—becoming—something that I think is true, that the tone of your letter gently derides, anyway.

  Thursday Afternoon [July 14, 1949]

  Ignore everything I said except by reading between the exaggerations to what I can’t express easily. I take my madhouses seriously; it seems I have been threatening and winking for years on the same kick. “What they undertook to do They brought to pass:All things hang like a drop of dew

  Upon a blade of grass”

  In Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors—Yeats.

  There is a pale Bartleby here, a Jewish boy named Fromm, (there are so many crazy Jews here) who sits in his chair. The first time I came in, I sit on a chair in the hall, waiting to be called to the preliminary routines of being shown my bed. He sat opposite me slumped over; he notices everything but won’t say nothing. A big fat German refugee who helps run occupational therapy, a woman, came up to him and said “Don’t you want to go up to O.T. today? Everybody else is there now. You don’t want to sit here alone?” He raised his pale, weak head and looked at her inquiringly, but didn’t say anything. Very gently she asked him again, hoping that he’d suddenly get up, perhaps, and follow her, repenting his loneliness. He looked at her a long time, pursed his lips, and slowly shook his head. Didn’t even say “I prefer not to,” just shook his head meditatively, after a long time in which he seemed to have been considering the question seriously; but shook his head, no, rationally. I immediately assumed that I could penetrate his mysterious secret refinement—but no—he was a poor lost wandering child of time. But the doctors (a whole hospital full of liberal minded social experimenters) have been treating him here since time immemorial trying to make him say yes. He has gone through insulin and/or electric shock therapy, psychotherapy, narcosynthesis, hypnoanalysis, everything but a lobotomy, and he still won’t say yes! He rarely talks—only once have I heard him raise his voice in the wilderness. I was told that it was a great disappointment to hear him at last, because he has a nasty whining complaining voice, that’s why he won’t talk. When I heard him, just two days ago, he was complaining about some bureaucratic mix up. It seems he had started to shave, finished half his face, and then was called to breakfast. He came back and found the razors locked up. He stood in the hall arguing with the nurse. She was saying “Mr. Fromm, but you must realize that there are certain set hours for shaving.” And he “But—But—But—I still have the soap dry on my face, I still have half my face shaved only,” etc. Once in awhile they take it in their heads to drag him by force up to occupational therapy, or to the roof. He doesn’t say a word, just resists; they have to bend his arm back, painfully, and take him to the elevator. But he stands near the elevator door and mournfully taps on it indicating that he wants to leave, go back to his chair. He [never] makes any trouble otherwise.

  Well, last night, I heard an awful hysterical shriek down the hall and rushed to investigate. I met Fromm rushing away from the scene. He looked up at me (his eyes, walking fast, on the ground) with a half-embarrassed, half-pleased smile. I hardly smiled back, thinking he was rushing away in fear from some awful scene of psychic carnage (patients often blow their tops, alone, or attack others) and I refused to acknowledge that I was afraid, so I didn’t half smile back, but half I did, because the scenes here are awesome. (The shriek, incidentally, was laughter.) What had happened? Fromm was sitting in the same chair, drooping, listless, quiet—and two other patients (one I will describe) were talking together, exchanging perhaps sarcastic jokes about the fact that they were in the bughouse—when suddenly, Fromm’s face lit up, he raised himself in his chair, and without a word, he began imitating everybody in the madhouse, making bleak mimicries of even patients that just entered, doctors, nurses, me, the people he was talking to, savage, hopeless gestures that caught and caricatured everybody. I would like to show him what I have just written, but I really don’t know what’s under his skin. He would probably hand it back to me with no sign at all—(after reading it carefully.)

  (The danger of such stories as this is that they are wishful exaggerations of possibility. O, Les maupions de l’eternite! But this is true nonetheless.)

  There is a boy here named Carl Solomon49 who is the most interesting of all. I spend many hours conversing with him. The first day (in the chairs) I gave way to the temptation of telling him about my mystical experiences. It is very embarrassing, in a mad house, to do this. He accepted me as if I were another nutty ignu, saying at the same time with a tone of conspiratorial guile, “O well, you’re new here.” He is also responsible for the line: “There are no intellectuals in madhouses.” He is a big queer from Greenwich Village, formerly from Brooklyn—a “swish” (he used to be he says) who is the real Levinsky—but big and fat, and interested in surrealistic literature. He went to CCNY and NYU, but never graduated, knew all the Village hipsters, and a whole gang of Trotskyite intellectuals (this generation’s Meyer Schapiros), and he is familiar with a great range of avant garde styles—also a true Rimbaud type, from his teens. Not creative, he doesn’t write, and doesn’t know much about literature really, except what he reads in little magazines (he had Tyger’s Eye, Partisan and Kenyon ) but he knows everything about that. Jumped ship and spent months wandering through Paris—finally at the age of consent he decided to commit suicide (on his 21st birthday) and committed himself to this place (entering a madhouse is the same thing as suicide he says—madhouse humor)—presented himself practically at the front door demanding a lobotomy. He apparently was full of great mad gestures when he first came in (with a copy of Nightwood50) threatening to smear the walls with excrement if he didn’t get a seclusion (private) room so that he could finish his book in peace. Also threatened the nurses, “If I ever hear anyone saying to me ‘Mr. Solomon you’re raving,’ I’ll turn over the ping pong table,” that happened almost immediately. There is a perfect opportunity here for existentialist absurdity—he is quiet now—speaks in a sinister tone to me of how the doctors are driving him sane by shock therapy “Making me say ‘momma!’ ” I tell him I want to be made to say momma and he says “of course (we do).” You can see what a weird sinister atmosphere here it is, Kafkian, because the doctors are in control and have the means to persuade over the most recalcitrant. Ha! I’d like to see Dennison exposed to these awful abysses and dangers. Here the abysses are real; people explode daily and the doctors! the doctors! my god, the doctors! They are fiends, I tell you, absolute Ghouls of Mediocrity. Horrible! They have the truth! They are right! They are all thin, pale lipped, four eyed, gawky, ungainly psychology majors from the colleges! All the seersucker liberals, dressed in the same suits, always with a vapid, half embarrassed, polite smile on their faces. “What? Mr. Solomon doesn’t eat today? Send him down to shock!” All the stoops from the past years, the bloodless apoetic bourgeoisie, the social scientists and rat experimenters, the blue eyes who went to the proms, who debated about socialism—went west on bus through the rolling wheatfields to study social psychology and medicine, the squares and ignoramuses, the Jews from Bronx. They all look the same, I tell you, I can’t tell one from another, except for some obviously crazy East Indian midget who also is a psychiatrist. What is he doing here in America psychologizing drug store cowboys with nervous breakdowns? These are the men who are going to fudge my immortal soul! Heavens! Where is Denison? Where is Pomeroy? Where is Huncke? Why don’t they come to my rescue? It is just like Russia! The machine men from the N.K.U.D. are making me recant my rootless cosmopolitanism.

  Speaking of this, because of Solomon, I am reading in all the little magazines about the latest Frenchmen. One is named Jean Genet, he is about
the greatest—greater than Céline, perhaps, but similar. Huge apocalyptic novels by homosexual hipster who grew up like Pomeroy in jail—an article in April 1949 Partisan Review talks about him—a book called Miracle de La Rose, a massive autobiography, a long prose poem on prison life! The hero is the Assassin Hercamone—“Whose shadowy presence in the death cell radiates throughout the prison a mystical intensity that is taken as the standard of Beauty and Achievement and to whom the author attaches the symbol of the rose. (His life lasted from his death sentence to his death . . .)” I speak the very language used by the mystics of all religions to speak of their gods and their mysteries. I read a 3 page excerpt on the mysteries of shoplifting ending (as I remember) “and so it is that at the judgment of the apocalypse God will call me to the dolmen realms with my own tender voice, crying, ‘Jean, Hean’.” (Dolmen realms is my own phrase).

  Also a man named Henri Michaux—interesting prose poems about the weird Aivinsikis (Heaven-seekers?) in Kenyon and Hudson Reviews.

  Most of all, a madman lately died named Antonin Artaud—spent 9 years in Rodez, a French madhouse (“M. Artaud ne mange pas au juurd’hue. Apportez lui au choc.”) Solomon was wandering around Paris and suddenly he heard barbaric, electrifying cries on the street. Terrified, penetrated, totally come down, frozen—he saw this madman dancing down the street repeating be-bop phrases—in such a voice—the body rigid, like a bolt of lightening “radiating” energy—a madman who had opened all doors and went yelling down Paris. He wrote a big poem—article about Van Gogh (translated in A Tiger’s Eye)—saying the same things about U.S. that I said about Cézanne. Solomon said it was the most profound single instant he ever had (till he came here where the doctors have insulin—and “the drugs fight it out.”)

  Several days ago a tongue tied boy of twenty named Bloom came in (he had been here several years before, too) talking about “concentrations of time” and eternity—he escaped, also, ran away, with attendants chasing him down the block, escaped into the subway. You see I am not unique in my formulations. I think Richard Weitzner would do well here. Before I came in I told him “If I’m mad, you’re madder—and I’m mad.” He looked at me, interested, and said “Really?”

  What does old J.B. [Justin Brierly] the dancing master, say about my presence here? Did he predict it before? He took me for the sane and bureaucratic type (between the two of us) when we were in Denver. Do you know? He said he wasn’t sure about you (you were kind of Bohemian, while I was the well-groomed Hungarian) but took you for O.K. since Ed White vouched for you (as I remember the conversation).

  Van Doren asked to see my book, (after I offered to show it to him).

  I haven’t done any writing here at all—no pen, no place to write, no calm yet. Wrote a poem ending:Never ask me what I mean

  all I say is what I seen

  though it seems to be a shame,

  anyone can say the same

  anyway it happened.

  It begins:It happened when the rain was grey,

  a gloomy, doomy, cloudy day.

  I don’t remember what it was

  But then it seemed as clear as glass,

  And anyway, it happened.

  This illustrates my desire to write a poem or a ballad with a real story line—but I wound up writing a poem about an unmentioned mystical “It”—a joke.

  I am beginning to hate my mother.

  Adieu—

  When you get to N.Y. call up my brother [Eugene Brooks], and he will tell you how to get to me. I can go out weekends—running around too loose is discouraged, though. Someone has to sign me out and take responsibility for me, and sign me back in—relative, sometimes a friend. When you get back, we’ll go away on a weekend maybe—to Cape Cod—where [John Clellon] Holmes, [Alan] Ansen, [Bill] Cannastra, [Ed] Stringham and many others are. I’ll only be able to see you on weekends for the time, but if I get better, I may have more privileges.

  I dreamed of Claude for two nites after I called him up.

  Send me news of Joan? I may write a letter to the Pharr Gazette [William Burroughs] in a few months.

  Adieu ancien ami;

  Allen

  P.S. Incoming letters are not censored. My mistake.

  I am going to a dance—the men and women patients—Local 802 musicians—on the roof—in a half hour—I wear white trousers, Fitzgerald shoes, yellow T-shirt.

  I am painting, too (for occupational therapy) a series of Revelations of Golgotha—Christ on the cross, great flaming white wings, and the great yellow Rose of Paradise for a halo, surrounded by thieves, one an idiot, one with a death’s head. (I always write you from institutions—Sheepshead, Paterson, Columbia, etc.)

  Jack Kerouac [Denver, Colorado] to

  Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York]

  July 26, 1949

  July—49

  Dear Allen:

  This must be brief. This is all the paper I have in the empty house a-moving—I think now I know what you mean. If only you could be straight like Yeats and come right out with it—and if I too did so. I sit here at the table. Your letter at my side.

  “What they undertook to do

  They brought to pass:

  All things are like letters

  Stamped and addressed—

  To me? Dear God to me?

  I flinch, now I flinch.

  All things are like this,

  They reach me finally.

  They sit there waiting for me.

  All things are like the

  Loaf of bread on the shelf,

  Brought to pass, deliver’d,

  To me, Happy Home Bread.

  All things are like the pencils

  On the shelf, and my cat

  Who sits alive, and the Sugar Bowl

  On the table, and the raindrops making.

  All things were intended to be

  What they have become in silence.

  Yes, the editor does not know,

  Or knowing, doesn’t care,

  Or you knowing, never mind,

  It’s all undertaken and done,

  And silence is your living middle prayer.

  ’Tis bleak to know what knowing is.

  ’Tis not seeing as seeing is known,

  But inside-eyes and bones that wait.

  All things are actually done and doing?

  Are you glad life lives? O Bleak!—

  O Bleak substantial bone all shadow.”—

  All this means

  that everything

  ←that exists, exists

  anyway, because

  of reality.

  Of course, I did not yet come out with it. But dear Allen I will yet. O folderblash.

  Now listen:—I have told Robert Giroux all about you and he is of course interested. This is the man who went to see Ezra Pound at the nuthouse, with Robert Lowell. (Tell you all about details.) When he was leaving, Pound shouted from the window: “Where are you going? Aren’t you eligible?” Since then Lowell went mad. Giroux is a little scared. He went to see Thomas Merton at the monastery. He knows [T. S.] Eliot. He is a big intellectual Catholic N.Y. Ignu—You’ll see. Bring him your volume of works to Harcourt Brace at 383 Madison—tell him your name. He knows you. He agreed that dead eyes see. But remember that he is also a big businessman like [Alan] Harrington51 would like to be—a stockholder in the company, editor in chief and member of the Opera Club (with Rockefellers.) Be smart, now, and don’t shit in your pants. The world is only waiting for you to pitch sad silent love in the place of excrement. Okay? By sad silent love I guess I mean some kind of compromise. But a bleak one, see? In daylight be bleak. All set. You may be published now.

  Your stories of the madhouse are so actual that I feel again as I did in the Navy nuthouse52—scared and seeing through heads. I used to sit with the worst ones to learn. Be kind and allow that I sought to see. Oh for Krissakes, I know everything . . . don’t you know that? We all do. We even all know that we’re all crazy. All of us are sick of our sad majestie
s. Don’t be so pedantic. Mush!

  Hal [Chase] is really dead. By that I mean that over the phone his voice yearned to see me, but he did not mention that it was Ginger told him not to see me in Denver. I know, thru his father who was my inadvertent spy. It is perhaps Ginger who can make us shudder all. She’s stark gone.

  Dancingmaster I love. I told him. I never knew Dancingmaster was so great. He took Giroux and I to the mountains at 85 miles per, to the opera. He had a woman with him, an old Edie, whom I screwed just a few hours ago, who gave me money.

  I wandered around Denver the other night looking for Pommy [Cassady] somehow. A black gal said “Hello Eddy.” I know I was really Eddy—was getting closer to Pommy. It was a mystic night in the Mexican-Nigger Denver. There was a softball game. I thought it was Pommy pitching. I thought any moment LuAnne53 would sneak up behind me and grab my cock. The stars, the night, the lilac-hedge, the cars, the street, the rickety porches. Down in Denver, down in Denver, all I did was die.

  How many times have you died?

  Then I saw your Denver Doldrums in my desk—Ah. Do you know what Giroux did? He revised the child saying from a dark corner—“I see you . . . peek-a-boo!” to just: “I see you . . .” I asked him if he knew what he had done and he said “Of course.” He likes me, by the way: we’re friends now; I like him; we’re going to go to shows and operas together in N.Y. A new great friend of my life. He hitch-hiked with me so as to understand On the Road. He is Eliot’s editor, remember, and Van Doren’s pal. He knows everybody—[Stephen] Spender et al, Jay Laughlin (New Directions) etc. He hitch hiked with me in my wilderness.