by Jack Kerouac
Incidentally if you can get a copy of American Mercury for April 1952, there’s a snotty story in it by Herb Gold about me (called the “Widening Flaw,” like the widening gyre) which is more unpleasant than Holmes’s book. Such notoriety. Really about me too. I didn’t review that bastard’s book for Commentary half year ago because I didn’t like it and didn’t want to bother saying anything unsympathetic or negative as matter of principle. Shows the difference in breed. He wrote me an apology (I sent him a card saying story stank and he was putting needles in my wax doll) saying he wrote it for money and also it wasn’t really about me, the stupid liar. Such a Dostoevskyan position it put me in. If I write him back I have to be proving that an insulting story was really written about me.
[Alan] Harrington’s wife (do you know?) has T.B. and she’s away at a hospital, I haven’t seen him. Never see Jose. Lucien said to tell you he was sorry you weren’t there, too, and that he can drink you under the table anytime even if your guts was so hugened “they filled up your whole insides.” We went to the circus, double date with me and Cessa’s old roommate, and he said, when, over public address system, someone was paged, “Oh god mothers done it again, she’s out on the Grand Concourse nude again.”
[ . . . ]
Agree about Holmes. And he’s so secretive, though. Lives alone now, is supposed to have a girl, but never says nothing, nobody knows what he’s up to. The most mysterious of anybody. But a poor writer.
[ . . . ]
Carl is a friend, but is working for publisher; he’s ok himself but has duties to do which may for temporary time be against the grain of our interests: i.e. changes in Bill’s book, necessitated, they think, possibly rightly, by economic needs of publishing. Therefore deal with him as someone you have to deal with, though friend. He ain’t you, you ain’t him. That’s as it gotta be. Only among lovers can we consider ourselves each other. Publishers are not lovers. They can’t be and stay in business. However, they are not infallible in their own business. It’s just all got to be worked out patiently. And, sad tho true you know often their business interests are actually not compatible with what is artistically and honestly true, or long-range beautiful. Not always incompatible, just sometimes: like can’t publish Genet unexpurgated as would be put in jail. Or even can’t publish my book as being for moment completely unprofitable. I decide that’s O.K. They really can’t. Like you can’t stay away from work or lose job. They don’t want to lose business, I don’t necessarily want them to; just when I don’t like them at all. This something conservative Alan Ansen taught me. Alan is a reactionary like Lucien, i.e. realist.
Jean Genet is in jail now in France on a murder charge, Carl found from publishers here. Catholic existentialists (Francois Mauriac) want to cut his head off. Big literary battle. Sartre trying to save him. Very wild death days for him. I think he wants to die like Cannastra. Don’t know anymore facts. Write [Bob] Burford? Hear from Seymour [Wyse]? I did, he’s ok said he wrote you. I saw Ed White. Not much to say. Will see him again for drunk talk.
Love,
Allen
Will pick up manuscript from your mother soon. Must tell Lucien, win him over. Swear he’s the type he’d sue anyway. Will look over book, consider situation before digging him on it.
O.K. Hunchback, will ask Williams. Sounds crazy to me, too crazy, but who knows.
Richmond Hill: I can’t do it anytime, only in moments of extreme wareness. Maybe that’s the whole secret of my being nuts. Moments before were such, swept over me, knocked me down, opened my eye. Now I look at something; just a dead tree, or the idea of a live tree, but not the living presence, unless I make my mind do tricks; and mind tricks never so visionary as those that sweep over unawares and authentic.
DON’T ANSWER MY LETTERS just drop me a little line, answering specific questions. When you off to Mexico?
Jack Kerouac [Mexico City, Mexico] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]
May 10, 1952
May 10
c/o Williams (Burroughs)
Orizaba 210, Apt. 5
Mexico City, Mexico
Dear Allen:
It took Bill and I ten days to find this splendid typewriter and ribbon and only recently we resumed work on our respective books.
I have no idea how it could have been possible for Hilda, Joan [Haverty]’s siren friend from Albany (you know, the brunette) to write, a month ago, a letter to Kells’ wife telling her I was coming to Mexico unless somebody in New York who knows my movements is hipping her and possibly Joan, not that it matters but why? Try to figure this leak for me, it ain’t right.82
Neal left me at Sonora, Arizona, on the Mexican border. He had his car with the seats all out (station wagon) and had pillows and babies and Carolyn all gypsied and happy in the back. I left the happy domestic couple and started on my new adventure, at dawn. Crossed the wirefence into Sonora (it was Nogales Arizona, excuse me into Nogales Sonora I went). To save money I bought 2nd class bus tickets south . . . it became a tremendous Odyssey of bouncing over dirt roads through jungles and changing buses to cross rivers on makeshift rafts with sometimes the bus itself fording the river up the wheeltops, great. I hooked up soon enough, around Guyamas, with a Mexican hipcat named Enrique by asking him, as we stood in front of some nepal cactus if he ever tried peotl; yes he had; he showed me you could also eat the fruit of the nepal for the palate; mescal is the peotl cactus. He started teaching me Spanish. With him he had a handmade radio repair ohms and amperes gadget for appearances, also it was one of his crafts (he’s 25) but actually we ended up using it for, pour cacher la merde, if you dig, which we picked up in an Oriental village or town called Culiacan, the opium center of the New World . . . I ate tortillas and carne in African stick huts in the jungle with pigs rubbing against my legs; I drank pure pulque from a pail, fresh from the field, from the plant, unfermented, pure milk of pulque makes you get the giggles, is the greatest drink in world. I ate strange new fruit, erenos, mangos, all kinds. In the back of the bus, drinking mescal, I sang bop for the Mexican singers who were curious to hear what it sounded like; I sang “Scrapple from the Apple” and Miles Davis’ “Israel” (excuse, it was written by Johnny Carisi whom I once met in Remo) (wearing checked topcoat with fur collar). They sang me all the songs, did “Ah ya ya ya yay yoy yoy” that Mexican laugh-cry; in Culiacan we got off bus, me, Enrique, and his 17 year old footman tall six foot Indian Girardo, like a safari and started off down hot dobe streets of midnight, straight for the stick hut Indian outskirts of town; near the sea, in the tropic of cancer, hot night, but pleasant, and soft, no more Friscos, no more fogs. We came to a gigantic space between the dobe town and some huts and crossed in the moonlight; one dim light ahead, in a stick hut; E. knocked; door was opened by white garbed Indian in big sombrero but with downturned hunkey like Indian face and scornful eyes. Some talk, we went in. On the bed sat a big gal, Indian’s wife; and then his buddy, an Indian goateed (not by style but didn’t shave) hipster-junkey, in fact opium eater, barefoot and tattered and dreaming on the bed-edge, and Hunkey like; and on the floor a drunken snorting soldier who’d just eaten some O [opium] after lush. I sat on bed, Enrique, he squatted on floor, Big Girardo stood in corner like a statue; the host, scornful, made several angry remarks; I translated one of them, “Is this Americano following me from America?” He had once gone to America, to L.A., for maybe twelve hours, and someone rushed . . . well he the hero of the gone heroes tribe of Mexican Fellaheen Afternoons and Mexico (I saw the Lord Star from a bus) gave me a medallion to look at which was either torn from his neck or from another torn, see, but I think it was torn from him but he recovered it and he gestured showing how this American (maybe cop) tore it from his neck in L.A., that’s what he did, was crucified in Los Angeles and returned to his Night Huts. Thus anger . . . understand, Allen that everything is going on in Indian dialect Spanish and that I am digging everything, all of it, almost perfectly, with my French Canadian mind in the middle of the Dakar
village.
I thought I was beyond Darwin’s chain,
A phosphorescent Jesus Christ in space, not a champion of the Fellaheen night
With my French Canadian mind.
Then Scornful, who was very husky and good-looking and dark, handed me a pellet and instructed my boy Enrique (who was squatting on the floor pleading for friendship and coolness but had to go through certain tests, just like two tribes meeting) so I looked at the pellet, and said opium, and Scornful laughed and was glad; pull’d out the weed, rolled several cigars, sprinkled O in them, and passed around. I got high on the second drag; I was sitting right next to the Indian Opium Saint who, whenever he succeeded in breaking into the conversation, made apparently vacuous or maybe mystic remarks that they in their practicality and hopness avoided—everybody, young Girardo, blasting. I got high and began to understand everything they said, and told them so, and chatted in Spanish with them, Scornful brought out a statue he’d made in Gesso . . . you turn it over and it’s an enormous cock; they all put it on their flies seriously to show me, laffing only a little, and on the other side a, I think, woman of some kind, or human figure. They told me (it took a half hour, with writing in my notebook) that in Spanish the other word for Gesso was Yis, or Gis. I showed them things like Zotzilaha, the Bat God, Yohualticitl, Lady of the Lights, Lanahuatl, Lord of Lepers, Citalpol, the Great Star; and they nodded (from my notebook). Then they apparently talked about politics, and at one point, by candlelight, he the host said “The earth was ours,” “La terra esta la notre” or however . . . I heard it clear as a bell and looked at him and we understood (about Indians I mean) (and after all my greatgreatgrandmother in Gaspe, 1700, you know, was an Indian, married my ancestry French baron) (but so they say in the family)—then it was time to retire, the three travelers went into Hunkey’s hut and there they gave me the choice of the bed or the ground, the bed was a straw pallet on crisscross sticks with a piece of cardboard for insulation under which the Saint Junkey kept his fixings and shit. He was offering his bed to all three of us, it was too small, so we stretched out on the ground with my seabag as a common pillow, I tossed with Girardo for the outside position, I lay down, Hunkey went out to get some shit, and we blew out the candle. But first Enrique promised to tell me all the mysteries of that night in the morning, which he later forgot. I wanted to know if there was a secret underground Indian hipster organization of revolutionary thinkers (all of them scornful of American hipsters like John Hoffman and Lamantia who come down among them not for shit or kicks but with big pretenses of scholarship and superiority, this is what Scornful indicated) and not with pure Allen Ginsberg-like friendship on the corner on Times Square is what these Indians of course want, see, no bullshit and hinct, they need Hunkies) (in Frisco, the last week I visited Lamantia with Neal, he is living in the former stone small castle of Hymie Bongoola (you know the name [Jaime de Angulo]) overlooking Berkeley Calif. He was reading The Book of the Dead, was reclined in sumptuous couch with book and Hymie’s old cancerous fourteen year old angora cat, and fireplace and rich furnishings and turned us on, three friends from Calif. U dropped in, a psychology major who is apparently his Burroughs, a tall handsome owner of the house (who is somewhat the Jack K.) (lounging on floor and sleeping eventually altho maybe his queer lover) and a young eager intelligent kid who was like you; this was his circle, and of course he was being Lucien, they talked about psychology in terms of “I saw that damned black background to the pink again in yesterday’s peotl,” “O well (Burroughs) it won’t hurt you for awhile.” (both snickering) Then: “Try this new drug, it may kill you, the greatest kick of all, man.” (snicker, turning away, real serpentine and hateful he is, Lamantia, very unfriendly, very queer, I touched his hand briefly while exchanging joint and they were cold and snakelike). He showed me his poems about the Indian tribes on the San Luis Potosi plateau, I forget tribe name, they deal with his visions of Peotl, and they, the lines are,arranged
like
this, for effect, but more complicated.
But I was disappointed in Neal that night for not at least digging the [?] instead holding the floor all night talking about [?] shit, “Chug chug, there’s the engineer easy as you [?] as I told him later, we were like two Italian mountain peasants allowed by local nobles of the castle to chat with them for a night and had failed on account of Guidro talking about his cart and horse all the time. This made Neal mad, and the next night, for the first time in our lives, we had a fight—he refused to drive me to Lamantia, outright. He made up for it the next day (at Carolyn’s urging because she loved us both) by buying a Chinese dinner, my favorite. But when I left Neal at Nogales I felt an undercurrent of sad hostility and also that he had hustled me there awful fast instead of the picnic we were going to have by the side of the road in Arizona or Imperial Valley even. So it goes, I dunno. But Neal was great and generous and good and my only complaint is cheap, i.e., he never talked with me any more, just “Yeah, yeah,” almost sullen, but he was busy, but he is dead, but he is our brother, so okay, forget it. He needs another explosion, I can tell you that much; for now he is all hungup on complete all-the-way-down-the-line materialistic money and stealing-groceries anxieties and nothing else, positively. Carolyn has to stay in the house for months at a time while he works every day, seven days on railroad and other jobs, to pay for things they never use, like cars not a drop to drink in house usually, no shiazit any more, nothing and Neal always gone. This was my observation; Carolyn is a great woman. I think it will work out when they move to San Jose, in the country, and then C. can at least grow a garden and get her kicks in sun, there being no sun where they live now, or nothing, although I never was so happy in my life than in that splendid attic with 11th edition Encyclopedia Britannica . . . but my complaints are the least of it, and I want to tell you in person later, and you understand, I don’t want to appear to be the ungrateful brother in law guest yakking in behind their backs which I ain’t, I was happy and secure for the first time in years and the first thing Neal said was “Do anything you like, man.” But to Culiacan: the candle out, I lay awake for an hour listening to the night sounds in the African village; footsteps crunched close to our door, all three of us stiffened; then they moved on; and sounds, rhythms, beasts, insects. Hunkey came back and slept, or dreamed. In the morning we all leapt up simultaneously and rubbed our eyes. I took a crap in a 1000-year old Indian stone crapper in the outdoors. Enrique went off and got me about two ounces of shit for equiv. $3, which is expensive down there but I had dough they knew. Then I got high again and sat listening, squatted, to noon sounds of village, which is a cooing, crooning, African, world Fellaheen sound, of women, children, men (in the yard was Scornful with a spear splitting twigs on the ground with great strokes of perfect aim, chatting and laughing with another spear wielder, mad); Hunkey just sat on bed with eyes open, moveless, a dead mad mystic Francis I tell you, down. Enrique rolled enormous Indian joints, laughed at my American sticks I rolled. In fact they roll em just the size of Lucky Strikes so they can smoke on street unnoticed, round, firm. Then I got shakes (from no eat and bouncing for days) and they wondered at me; I sweated. Scornful went out and brought me hot food; I ate happy; they gave me hot peppers to revive my system; I drank a pop with it; they kept rushing out for soup, etc. I heard them high on tea discussing whose food it was . . . “Maria” . . . they gossiped after her; I saw enormous complexities of Indian noon-time gossip and love affairs, etc. Hunkey’s wife came in for a brief giggling look at me; I bowed. Then I was surrounded by cops and soldiers. Guess what, all they wanted (tho my heart sank) was some tea; I gave a lot of it away. “I’m going to be arrested in Mexico finally,” was my thought but nothing happened, and we left, safari, waving, and cut; in the heat of the day Enrique made us stop in the old church for a minute to rest and pray; then we moved on, left Girardo in Culiacan with tea and twenty pesos, got bus for Mazatlan, were entertained by young intellectual busline employee (two mission oranges) (at sidewalk crazy cafe) wh
o said he read Flammarian . . . I told him I read existentialists, he nodded, smiled. Enroute to Mazatlan Enrique got a woman who offered us her house and food for ten pesos in Mazatlan that night, Enrique accepted cause he wanted to lay her, but I didn’t feel like being a watcher of Spanish lovers, but I agreed; in Mazatlan we took our gear to her two aunts’ house in the Dakar slums (you know Mazatlan is just like an African city, hot and flat right on the surf, no tourists whatever, the wonder spot of the Mexicos really but nobody hardly knows, a dusty crazy wild city on beautiful Acapulco surfs) and then Enrique and I went swimming, blasted bombers on sand, turned and [?]
