by Jack Kerouac
How do you think I arrived at last four five words if not in trance?
I explained all this method to Neal.
But here’s that (best) line “The charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power . . .” This is obviously something I had to say in spite of myself . . . tarpaulin, too, don’t be frightened, is obviously the key . . . man that’s a road. It will take fifty years for people to realize that that’s a road. In fact I distinctly remember hovering over the word “tarpaulin” (even thought of writing tarpolon or anything) but something told me that “tarpaulin” was what I’d thought, “Tarpaulin” was what it is . . . Do you understand Blake? Dickinson? and Shakespeare when he wants to mouth the general sound of doom, “peaked, like John a Dreams” . . . simply does what he hears . . . “greasy Joan doth keel the pot; (and birds sit brooding in the snow . . . ”). However I got very tired of blowing all that poetry and am now resting and getting hi and going to movies etc. and trying to read Gore Vidal [The] Judgment of Paris which is so ugly transparent in its method, the protagonist-hero who is unqueer but all camp (with his bloody tattoo on a thigh) and craptalk, the only thing good, as Bill says, are the satirical queer scenes, especially Lord Ayres or whatever his name . . . and they expect us to be like Vidal, great god.) (Regressing to sophomore imitations of Henry James.) If Carl publishes Genet in drugstores all over America he will have done a service to his century.
Listen, last December, on a whim, I sent Eric Protter a little short story about J. [Jean]—title was “What the Young French Writers should be Writing” and it was that dream of Neal (remember the dialog where he says “I don’t understand that spectral canal of yours, Brooklyn scares me, the el’s are too mad, I want to go back to the white hills of Frisco” (facsimile) “that pump of yours, those potatoes, those wild orgies with sailors and the bourgeois running across the burning bridge with dogs under their arms, help me” (and all that) I sent to New Story, changing all the names to French names (Neal was Jean) and the cities to French cities (New Orleans—Bordeaux) but the little pissyass shit sent it back saying he wanted something more conventional. You know the type. So beware.
You want me to send you (my dear agent you are now boy) some sketches etc. well it’s all in Road . . . be sure and extract what you like for individual publications, I am egal on the whole thing, it’s all good, all publishable . . . (except obvious cases). You can make short pieces out of any part . . . send jazz parts to Metronome, to Ulanov86 the vain cock, he thinks the sun rises and sets on his dictionary.
As for peotl—it’s grooking in the desert to eat our hearts alive.
What you might do, if Lucien comes to Mex again this summer with Cessa, come with him, if we’re still here.
Good for dargolos [Davalos] . . . he sure put old Dusty down that night. What Ed White say? Where’s Holmes? Calling for Rock and Rise is in Road somewhere . . . around page 490. I won’t comment on your splendid letter . . . let us now begin negotiations; write often because (if you have time) I and Bill are lonely. My contract is 10% for first 10,000, then more, 15% . . . we can show Road to Scribner’s or Simpson or Farrar Straus (Stanley Young) if necessary, change title to Visions of Neal or something, and I write new Road for Wyn.
But methinks none of such crap necessary. Isn’t Queer great?
Jack
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [Mexico City, Mexico]
June 12, 1952
Dear Jack:
All right, the manuscript arrived a few days ago, On the Road. Carl read it, I read it once, and [John Clellon] Holmes has it.
I don’t see how it will ever be published, it’s so personal, it’s so full of sex language, so full of our local mythological references, I don’t know if it would make sense to any publisher—by make sense I mean, if you could follow what happened to what characters where.
The language is great, the blowing is mostly great, the inventions have full-blown ecstatic style. Also the tone of speech is at times nearer to un-innocent heart speech (“why did I write this?” and “I’m a criminal”). Where you are writing steadily and well, the sketches, the exposition, it’s the best that is written in America, I do believe. I’m not stopping now to write you praise-letter, tho maybe I should etc. etc. but on my mind I am worried by the whole book. It’s crazy (not merely inspired crazy) but unrelated crazy.
Well you know your book. Wyn I’m positive won’t take it now, I don’t know who will. I think could be published by New Story people in Europe, but will you be revising it at all? What you trying to put down, man? You know what you done.
This is no big letter, can’t see Bill’s for reason. I will, all by myself, read book second time, next week, and write you twenty page letter taking book section by section figuring my reactions.
For an on the spot minute guess:1. You still didn’t cover Neal’s history.
2. You covered your own reactions.
3. You mixed them up chronologically, so that it’s hard to tell what happened when.
4. The totally surrealistic sections (blowing on sounds and refusing to make sense) (in section following tape-records) is just a hang-up, hang-up.
5. Tape records are partly hang-up, should be shortened and put in place after final trip to Frisco.
6. Sounds like you were just blowing and tacking things together, personally unrelating them, just for madness sake, or despair.
I think book is great but crazy in a bad way, and got aesthetically and publishing-wise, to be pulled back together, re constructed. I can’t see anyone, New Directions, Europe, putting it out as it is. They won’t, they won’t.
HODOS CHAMELIONTOS in Yeats is series of unrelated images, chameleon of the imagination diddling about in the void or hang-up, meaning nothing to each other.
Should keep Sax into framework of a myth, a FRAMEWORK, and not violate framework by interrupting Sax to talk about Lucien’s formerly golden hair or Neal’s big cock or my evil mind, or your lost bone. The book is the lost bone, itself.
On the Road just drags itself exhausted over the goal line of meaning to someone else (or to me who knows the story); it’s salvageable. I mean it needs to be salvaged. You’re handing up the whole goddam junkyard including the I agh up erp esc baglooie ain’t you read what I’m shayinoo im tryinting tink try I mea mama thatsshokay but you gotta make sense you gotta muk sense, jub, jack, fik, anyone can bup it, you bubblerel, Zag, Nealg, Loog, Boolb, Joon, Hawk, Nella Grebsnig. And if you doan wanna make sense, shit, then put the nonsense on one page boiled down to one intense nervous collapse out of intelligibility (like [William Carlos] Williams did in a section of Paterson, scrambling up the type, and followed it real cool by a list of the geological formations of shale etc. under the fuckin falls, and then went on to say “This is a poem, a POEM.”) and then go on talkin like nothing ever happened cause nothin did. Nothing jess interrupted something. But nothing juss keeps breaking in out all over the joint, you’ll be talking along, and say “he come out of the room like a criminal—then you’ll add—like a shrouder (whoever heard of ?) then you’ll add—like black winged rubens—then you’ll go poetic and say—like pink winged Stoobens, the hopscotch Whiz of grammar school, hopscotch, the game of Archangels, it’s hevvin, it’s clouds, meanwhile he was alla time juss commin out of that room, but you got us not only up inna clouds, via Steubenville and urk ep blook, but via also I am JK interrupting myself.
Well maybe it’s all three dimensional and awright aesthetically or humanly, so I will re re re read your whole buke, puke anall, (and jeez, Joyce did it, but you’re juss crappin around thoughtlessly with that trickstyle often, and it’s not so good.) reread your whole book I will,
and give you a blow by blow account of how it comes off.
And incidentally don’t be too flabbergasted flip at my foregoing because I Allen Ginsberg one and only, have just finished cutting down my book from 89 poems to a mere perfect 42, just to cut out the comedy and crap
and personalia jackoffs, for leanness, and humanness, it is ACTION WHICH IS DEMANDED AT THIS TIME. That’s what he sez, though god know what kind of action he talkin about.
Editors’ Note: Kerouac was staying with William Burroughs in Mexico when he received Ginsberg’s letter. He was working on the manuscript of Doctor Sax and was penniless as usual. After borrowing some money from Burroughs he returned to his sister’s house in North Carolina for a brief visit and then headed to San Jose to live with Neal Cassady, who offered to help him get a railroad job.
Jack Kerouac [San Jose, California] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]
October 8, 1952
Allen Ginsberg
This is to notify you and the rest of the whole lot what I think of you. Can you tell me even for instance . . . with all this talk about pocket book styles and the new trend in writing about drugs and sex why my On the Road written in 1951 wasn’t ever published?—why they publish Holmes’s book [Go] which stinks and don’t publish mine because it’s not as good as some of the other things I’ve done? Is this the fate of an idiot who can’t handle his own business or [is] it the general fartsmell of New York in general . . . And you who I thought was my friend—you sit there and look me in the eye and tell me the On the Road I wrote at Neal’s is “imperfect” as though anything you ever did or anybody was perfect? . . . and don’t lift a finger or say a word for it . . . Do you think I don’t realize how jealous you are and how you and Holmes and Solomon all would give your right arm to be able to write like the writing in On the Road. And leaving me no alternative but to write stupid letters like this when if instead you were men I could at least get the satisfaction of belting you all in the kisser—too many glasses to take off. Why you goddamn cheap little shits are all the same and always were and why did I ever listen and fawn and fart with you—fifteen years of my life wasted among the cruds of New York, from the millionaire jews of Horace Mann who’d kissed my ass for football and now would hesitate to introduce their wives to me, to the likes of you . . . poets indeed . . . distant small-sized variants of same . . . baroque neat-packaged acceptable (small print in the middle of neat page of poetry book) page . . . Not only have you grieved me now by your statement that there is nothing in On the Road you didn’t know about (which is a lie because at just one glance I can see that you never knew the slightest beginning detail of even something so simple as Neal’s work life and what he does)—and [Carl] Solomon pretending to be an interesting saint, claims he doesn’t understand contracts, why in ten years I’ll be lucky to have the right to look into his window on Xmas eve . . . he’ll be so rich and fat and so endowed with the skinny horrors of other men into one great puff-ball of satisfied suckup . . . Parasites every one of you, just like Edie said. And now even John Holmes, who as everybody knows lives in complete illusion about everything, writes about things he doesn’t know about, and with hostility at that, (it comes out in hairy skinny legs of Stofsky and “awkward” Pasternak, the sonofabitch jealous of his own flirtatious wife, I didn’t ask for Marian’s attentions . . . awkwardness indeed, I imagine anybody who walks on ordinary legs would look awkward around effeminate flip-hips and swish like him)—And the smell of his work is the smell of death. . . . Everybody knows he has no talent . . . and so what right has he, who knows nothing, to pass any kind of judgment on my book—He doesn’t even have the right to surl in silence about it—His book stinks, and your book is only mediocre, and you all know it, and my book is great and will never be published. Beware of meeting me on the street in New York. Beware also of giving any leads as to my whereabouts. I’ll come up to New York and trace down the lead. You’re all a bunch of insignificant literary egos . . . you can’t even leave New York you’re so stultified . . . Even [Gregory] Corso with his Tannhauser chariots running down everyone else has already begun to pick up . . . Tell him to go away . . . tell him to find himself in his own grave . . . My heart bleeds every time I look at On the Road . . . I see it now, why it is great and why you hate it and what the world is . . . specifically what you are . . . and what you, Allen Ginsberg, are . . . a disbeliever, a hater, your giggles don’t fool me, I see the snarl under it . . . Go ahead and do what you like, I want peace with myself . . . I shall certainly never find peace till I wash my hands completely of the dirty brush and stain of New York and everything that you and the city stand for . . . And everybody knows it . . . And Chase knew it long ago . . . that is because he was an old man from the start . . . And now I am an old man too . . . I realize that I am no longer attractive to you queers . . . Go blow your Corsos . . . I hope he sinks a knife in you . . . Go on and hate each other and sneer and get jealous and . . . My whole record in NY is one long almost humorous chronicle of a real dumb lil abner getting taken in by fat pigjaws . . . I realize the humour of it . . . and laugh just as much as you . . . But here on in I’m not laughing . . . Paranoia me no paranoias either . . . Because of people like you and Giroux . . . even with G. you fucked me up from making money because he hated you . . . and came in with Neal that night and Neal right away wanted to steal a book from the office, sure, what would you say if I went to your NORC [National Opinion Research Center] and stole things and made fun of it . . . and Lucien with his shitty little ego trying to make me cry over Sarah and then telling me at the lowest ebb of my life that I would be awful easy to forget . . . He must know by now unless be-sotted and stupid with drink that it is so about everybody . . . how easily one may disappear . . . and be forgotten completely . . . and make dark corruption spot in dirt . . . well alright. And all of you, even Sarah I don’t even care to know any more or who will ever hear of this insane letter . . . all of you fucked me up . . . with the exception of Tony Monacchio and a few other angels . . . and so I say to you, never speak to me again or try to write or have anything to do with me . . . besides you will never probably see me again . . . and that is good . . . the time has come for all you frivolous fools to realize what the subject of poetry is . . . death . . . so die . . . and die like men . . . and shut up . . . and above all . . . leave me alone . . . and don’t ever darken me again.
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [San Francisco, California]
ca. November 1-7, 1952, but before November 8, 1952
Dear Jack:
I just finished Doctor Sax, it’s hard to write you because of all previous crap with On the Road and your letter—hard to accept or deny reality of your letter—but that aside.
I think Dr. Sax is better than On the Road (I’m expounding here on just harmony and appearance—On the Road has great original method to be sure) and I think also it can be published—unlike what I thought of On Road. Sax is a big success for my money, as a completed project.
Though I think you can still do more with it and it ought to be rewritten it’s still muddy and creaky here and there. But on the whole its construction is mainly perfect—particularly the final revelations of the last pages, and the general sanity of whole approach makes it possible to appreciate the delights of moment to moment verbal creation.
I believe with On the Road and Sax, which makes that tendency crystal clear, you really have hit a whole lode of originality of method of writing prose—method incidentally though like Joyce is your own origin and make and style, similarities only superficial your neologisms are not foggy philological precisions but aural (hear-able) inventions that carry meanings.
And the aural cadence of your prose which Joyce also specializes in—is done without much damage to natural sequences of sentence construction. He had to melt and fuckup sentences, and fuggup words and fog them to get them to join in melodious series. I notice your melodies are often in an Irish-Joyce mélange of the sentence, but in a natural Nealish speak cadence.
Your imagery—which is simple like Lucien’s, is also new-old humble poetry (illustration later on)
The philosophic line is satisfactory and has moments of sublimity. By satisfactory I m
ean harmonious and symmetrical. Not just a Chinese puzzle.
The structure of reality and myth—shuttling back and forth, is a stroke of genius: casting the myth within the frame of childish fantasy, so giving it reality [?] in terms of its frame.
The trouble with the reality side of your book, I think it isn’t too interesting all the time, I get bored by it, because it’s partly a series of incidents unrelated except by process of general association—i.e. it has not much compel[ing] inner structure to make you want to read on and find out what is going on or what is happening in the real life of [?] that is being symbolized by this grand fantasy life. Also it waters down interest in real life recollections not to have them tied down to anything personally central—except the hint of discovery of Sex. The flood, too helps maintain interest as it builds up, in real life. Perhaps if you felt inclined to improve this book you might put in what was actually there—some great reality crisis as what you’ve had in last years, or some earlier reality crisis like sex, I don’t know, whatever in real terms the imaginary myth might correspond to in real life human development preadolescent trials and traumas. I’m not being clinical, tho I’m not writing poetry here, just observations. The real life side of the books was held together for me by the intrinsic interest of the experiences described, anecdotes, and incidents etc. and secondly held my interest to it by the continual brilliance of the language—so that at times I even felt that nothing was happening at all except verbally, but that was enough—though as in parts of On the Road, that can be too much meaningless bop to keep the attention fixed upon, even if you try to follow.
