by Jack Kerouac
I am hitch-hiking to Detroit tomorrow. No more letters to 6100 W. Center. See you in N.Y. in two weeks. I don’t know anything about those crazy Jewish cats in your nuthouse. Maybe I will in time. They remind me of Norman.54 Talk to Walter Adams who is bleak. [Allan] Temko wrote me a big letter from Prague. I am getting some money Xmas—want to go to a school in Italy with Edie, and meet Giroux in Rome in spring and go to Paris. Won’t be rich till October 1950. So live cheaply first.
Please do what you say—go get Denison [Burroughs] and Pommy. I’ve written twice to Pommy, no answer. What’s the matter? I’ll write to Denison and tell him to move to N.Y. Why are we all camping in California, Texas and Colorado? I would love Denison to go to Europe with me. Also his trust fund would be a fortune out there, where one lives well on $30 a month. Ask Adams if this is not so. Know what, Edie wrote to me?—“Maybe you and I are just a dream.” Also:—“I guess we’ll always be night birds.” Finally—“I love to drink coffee with people in the morning.” She now sounds like a sad, straight woman. I yearn for her cunt. Every now and then I feel like Pommy about that—more and more. I want us all together before it is too late, before the Season dies from neglect (as they always do in time.) Why? Do you mind my questions?
C’est tranquil sa—Excuse my soul.
As ever,
Jack
Thanks for your huge and amazing letter—read it to Giroux, too.
1950
Editors’ Note: Kerouac left Denver, originally planning to stop in Detroit to see his former wife, Edie, but instead he headed for San Francisco where Neal Cassady promised him free room and board for as long as he wanted to stay. That arrangement didn’t last long, and, by August, Neal and Jack were both in New York City. Throughout the fall, Ginsberg remained in the mental hospital (although he received his mail at his father’s house in Paterson, where he went every weekend). He continued to hope that something positive would come out of his therapy, but as time went by, he began to think that the doctors didn’t know much more about mental illness than he did. His dream of a sudden cure to his problems faded.
Jack Kerouac [New York, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]
January 13, 1950
Dear Allen:
Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don’t dislike me. What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they’re angels. God’s angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old man in a lunchcart, and God—their faces! I wondered what God was up to. In the subway I almost jumped up to yell, “What was that for? What’s going on up there? What do you mean by that?” Jesus, Allen, life ain’t worth the candle, we all know it, and almost everything is wrong, but there’s nothing we can do about it, and living is heaven.
Well, here we are in heaven. This is what heaven is like. Also in the subway I suddenly shuddered, for a crack had opened, like cracks open in the ground when there’s an earthquake, only this crack opened in the air, and I saw pits. I was suddenly no longer an angel, but a shuddering devil.
Mainly, I wanted to tell you how dearly I regard your soul, and value your existence, and wish for your recognition of my heart’s desire, in short, I admire and love you and consider you a great man always. Let me boast a moment in order to give value to this, for what good is regard from a dunce, a spook, an elephant or a chocolate drop: My English editor, (ain’t met him yet) sent G. [Giroux] a postcard showing picture of the antique Counting House in their firm, and said, “Place looks exactly like it did when we published Goldsmith & Johnson. Please tell Kerouac [he] is in good company, and what is more, is worthy of it.”
A beat American kid from a milltown, me, is now side by side with Goldsmith & Johnson. Isn’t it strange historically? if not actually? Let us get on with the mystery of the world.
For instance, why do I write you this note in spite of the fact that I’ll see you tomorrow night?—and live in the same city with you. Why is everybody like Sebastian [Sampas]55 in the record, stammering, stumbling at the end, fainter and fainter with all the scratching, saying, “So long, Jack old boy . . . take it easy, please . . . goodbye . . . old friend . . . see you soon, I guess . . . goodbye . . . take care of yourself, now . . . farewell . . . I guess . . . ’bye . . . so long . . . goodbye old man.” Most people spend their lives saying that to their best friends; they’re always putting on their coats and leaving, and saying goodnight, and going down the street, and turning to wave a last time . . . Where they go?
Let me tell you what the Archangel is going to do. At a big Walter Adams party, or a [Bill] Cannastra party, the Archangel is suddenly going to appear in a blinding flash of white light, among actual waterfalls of honey-light also, and everybody will keep still while the Archangel, with its voice, speaks. We will see, hear, and shudder. Behind the archangel we will see that Einstein is all wrong about enclosed space . . . there will be endless space, infinities of Celestial Vine, and all the gores of the mires below, and the joyful singing of angels mingling with the shudders of devils. We’ll see that everything exists. For the first time we’ll realize that it’s all alive, like baby turtles, and moves in the middle of the night at a party . . . and the archangel is going to tell us off. Then clouds of cherubs will fall, mingled with satyrs and whatnots and spooks. If we were not haunted by the mystery of the world, we wouldn’t realize nothing.
Jack
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]
Paterson Midnight, Jan. 21, 50
Dear Jack:
The Letter of the Archangel was received here but unfortunately my father misplaced it and it can’t be found. He did not do it purposely. We spent a long time looking. I told him not to worry.
I was sick and vomited last time we were at Neal’s,56 and when I rose in the morning you grabbed the bed. I was weak on my knees and still sick and that was why I was so avaricious to get back into bed. I felt so lousy I was willing to exasperate you. I remember you got stuck on the chair but what could I do? I hope you are not still angry.
I went to a party last night—a sweet sixteen party for my sister Sheila—and was a wallflower half the night except for a few moments when I danced with some teen age girls, and the end of the night when I got drunk with my step brother (who thought everybody at the party was “phony”) and told him tales about Dakar witch doctors and New Orleans whorehouses. I was surprised by the boys there—most of them sharply dressed poker playing frat brothers, all full of experience and sensuality more mature than my own. I began to feel so miserable that I almost left, feeling no reason for my own existence—like a cockroach—till Harold (my step brother) wandered in late with a frown of anger and looked at the crowd of necking couples and cursed them all up and down for a bunch of phony slobs. Ah, me! I began sheepishly asking him what was wrong, were they really nowhere or was I and he nowhere. He insisted it was them and we got drunk after that. After a while he began insulting all the young girls who came through the kitchen where we were drinking, calling them whores, and spilling water on their dresses (down their bosoms). I had a feeling all the people noticed me and asked who was that jerk. O Paterson, what crucifixions do I not suffer for love of thee? I hope someday to become familiar with them all and accepted when I have earned the honor. The reason I want to return home is to suffer fully the abyss between myself and my generation and home and understand the years that have separated us and go back and learn to live unselfconsciously with my people. So far I am Francis in the attic. I am amazed how much I think of him and how true he is; but I am Francis after his own death returned to life with another chance to be humiliated and not reject the humiliation. (Your novel was a world that is dead, and the characters are still alive walking through the same labyrinth on the other side of death, which is the last page of the written book.)
When I slept last night I dreamed a dream. I had just left Hen
ry Street and was looking for Bill [Burroughs]. We had no appointment [to] meet with each other, because we thought that the world was dead, and didn’t know what we would have to tell each other. But we knew that we would meet each other somewhere in New York. It would be a casual meeting, and very short: he would have business, and I would go on to a movie, though we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. While I walked down the street toward Eighth Ave. I looked at the sky, and there I saw an eastern auroral halo, as from the moon. And I turned and I looked to the west, and I beheld a halo in the sky on the opposite half of the sphere. Each of the two haloes was a dim circular light exactly similar, far up in the heavens, and yet large enough to cover a piece of the night equal to the size of ten moons. After I saw this, I wished that Bill was there and hoped that he saw it wherever in the city he was. I couldn’t find him on the Avenue, nor could I find the bars between 42-43 St., then I discovered I was on Seventh Avenue not Eighth Avenue. I went to Eighth Avenue, and tried to find him, but it was too late, he had gone, and not waited for me.
This dream is like one that I once had and dimly remember when I was lost on an unknown vast subway system, and was looking for a home-pad in Brooklyn.
There is a political fight in Paterson between the corrupt powerful old Republican Party, which has lost the last two elections, and a young powerful Democratic Party which has become corrupt since its victories. My father is vociferously in favor of the Democrats. I tried to get a job on the Morning Call paper, Democratic, but they are small and run by old men and have no jobs. I went to friends who worked on the Evening News (Republican) but they badgered me for hours with questions of loyalty to the paper’s policies and reproaches about my father’s public opinions and speech makings. It turns out that the owner would be stupid to do a favor for Louis Ginsberg’s son when Louis has been openly making violent attacks on the paper and its candidate in the last years, though he is a friend of the editor. I was told that Paterson is run on a strictly cutthroat dollar and power basis and that because my father had stuck his neck out for no reason other than dreamy political idealistic opinions, and had been taken advantage of for his good name to get the votes of the Jews by the mayor, I was considered an unlikely and absurd person to give a job to (not to mention my ill fame, which didn’t hit the papers here last spring, but was brought to the attention of the editors, etc.) I next will try the Passaic Herald News (three miles away). A fast and growing conservative newspaper which owns a television station too. I am beginning to get a touch of just how strange and actually sordid the atmosphere here is among those who run the city officially. But perhaps that is just out of the hassle of trying to hustle a job that involves “responsibility.” Most people here who seem to be at all sensitive or powerful or rich seem to live lives and think thoughts dominated by the smallest sounding (to an outsider) fears for social security and business position. Friendship is actually political. I would not generalize so but these are just the impressions of the weekend surface scratching done with no axe to grind (not even aesthetic that is while I was in action I did not think how mean it was of the paper to refuse a minor job to their frustrated genius) and the real actual degradation of personality and love and work, the cruelty of the system—the system as an actual horrible machine to be felt and suffered in the middle, watching people lie and cheat each other staggering their own imaginations and mine for its reality—makes me wonder if it turns out to be true, what will happen to me here. Perhaps I shall actually be crucified after all. If what I am beginning to suspect is true it will be just like rolling off a log. If it is true Lucien can’t see because he is on top, not in the grass roots. Everybody is sick at heart at home and full of blatant terrorist machinery. In some south sea islands they have cruel puberty rites, because the old men are so evil, and, not that they want to hurt the young, but they want to teach them a lesson in one complete formal explosion without individual humiliation.
I am beginning to wonder how evil the world is again. I thought that by accepting chaos it would make everything all right.
I took Varda (the Assyrian looking girl at Simpson’s) out on a date last week-end and she introduced me to her best girlfriend and made supper at her house (the girlfriend, who gave me a painting she made). I guess I will see her mostly for a while, of the run of females I know. I wish I could meet a really gone sweet girl who could love me. But I guess a really gone sweet girl is too much to expect.
Why is everything so hard?
The last lines of Orwell’s 1984 are stubborn self-willed exile from the loving breast! “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
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:1. There was hardly any point at which I felt that your prose was exaggerated or overstrained beyond sympathy.
2. I saw (as I did not see the first time—perhaps this is the effect of rereading) the structure more clearly and was continually pleasurably surprised by the inevitability of section after section of development of the history of each character, each thing in its turn. It seemed at moments clearly consummately in control. Your manly (Goethean) intelligence emerges and created its effects in a way of ease and “virtuoso” of craft that I feared to hope for and only half realized was possible anyway—you continually surprised me and led me along.
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:1. Rain sleeps
2. New York and Dennison [Burroughs]
3. The Figure of Waldo
4. The “Vultures of the Andes” on press boxes
5. Francis Martin’s experience with the Three Witches at the funeral.
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 r
esponse 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.
