Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

by Jack Kerouac

  So to continue otherwise: I live in the Marconi hotel—run by dykes—first night they say to me—“here’s yr. key. You want to have anybody in your room go ahead and have a ball we’re drunk all night ourselves”—and they are. Middle size room $6.00 carpet soft on floor privacy, Sublette upstairs and—horrors! Last Friday night Sheila takes me to big party of nowhere engineers on Telegraph Hill. I come home 4:30 AM meet Sublette, and Cosmo (a weird egotistic small poet smart aleck) go and get coffee, the cops look at us, search us, find white powder on Cosmo. To jail, all night, my first week here, as a vagrant (tho I have $18.00 and a job for Monday to come and a room and party suit on) in tank, me and Sublette horrified (I had a pipe in my room but they didn’t look) but actually great kicks—set free the next day, Cosmo doesn’t get out for 4 days—the powder was foot powder not junk all along—he kept telling them but didn’t believe and had it analyzed and finally let him go. So Bill better be careful.

  [ . . . ]

  I at last enclose Siesta In Xbalba. It won’t be finished (I won’t quit trying to add) for a while but this is the best I can do with it after four months—five months. The handwritten part still doesn’t get a vision of Europe like I hope for but just mentions it and signs off. Show this to Lucien maybe and Cowley maybe? if you dig it—maybe it’s too revised and formal now.

  Yes, Rexroth was only an idea just in case nothing else was happening, Cowley much better. By the way the Ansen type poet round here name of Robert Duncan, friend of Pound, runs a crappy tho sincere Pound type poetry circle here part of S.F. College came to my room and saw a typed copy of your “Essentials” of Prose (remember, you wrote it down on E. 7th St.) and dug it (strangely particularly the part of no revision and the general conception of spontaneity) and asked to borrow it to make a copy and wanted your address and wanted to know who you were etc. Well he’s a funny guy, queer, his poetry is all crazy and surrealist and he’s a friend of Lamantia and his poetry also is no good because too aesthetically hung up all about his sensibility faced with the precise tone of his piddle—Light, etc.—that’s the subject matter—but it’s all right he’s nice a curious person, talks too much in front of his young Corso students.

  Neal—he played chess with Dick Woods and was blind, etc. except in a weird way very nice to me, but he is mad—the thing is Jack he really is suffering some incipient insanity—the charnel Carolyn, the frantic sex—now it is terrible pathetic mad rushing around and can’t even make it—getting caught masturbating by his conductor—fucking seventy year old spiritualist woman in S.J. [San Jose]—the crackpot Cayce which he holds on to like some doctrine in an asylum—half serious obsession—I see him driving now frantic with empty hatreds of other drivers on Bloody Bayshore—he hates Carolyn I think—but nowhere else to go—no way out of the three children R.R. After I left they both went and took (o comedy horror) the Rorschach Ink Blot Test (which is maybe more or less accurate in determining degree of clinical insanity if you believe in the word, which I don’t for me and you, but sort of do now for Neal) and he told me, jumbled, four conclusions: 1). sexually sadistic 2). pre-psychotic 3). “delusive thought system” 4). intense anxiety prone. Well as to number 3 that means if anything he has some kind of mad “Cayce—sex—driving—T”—system which is operating independently sort of convulsively compulsively running him around a kind of rat race. He don’t write no more “I was writing about sex and you dig it’s sinful, I know etc.” he says. And Carolyn agrees “What good is that sort of thing, you call that art? It’s just dirt.” I tell you that household is—and so much gold in trash now, the chess, maniacal. He won’t talk to me, except in a sort of dissociated way. Comes to my room in Frisco gets in bed and plays with self. You know how I dig sex my way any kind but there’s something wrong in the total sense of masturbatory insistence and franticness of that. He says generally “I have no feelings—never had.” I mean we ball as ever still but read on. His stomach is bad—nausea at meals, maybe ulcers. His suffering is—well not suffering, his pain or dissociation from contact or good sweet kicks is more and more autonomous, more overloaded, heavy. He sees it, no way out for him he says once in a while, drives faster. I do all I can to make it with him—as friend I mean,—I don’t really care about the cock—it seems too dislocated for that. (I mean this judgment does not come from morbid lusting turning sour exactly.) Would be willing to take vows of leave him alone etc. if he only would be sweet and care-ful again and open to gentle kicks and images and poetry and digging things of all natures—and no time for kicks on jazz—he’s too busy—Chess. Or if we did go it would be a ragged fury of being too high driving too fast, all too hot and horrible. Well he and I love each other, it’s all there no doubt, but everything seems impossible as far as any real contact and natural enjoyment. He really gets no kicks from me as Allen or Levinsky or poet or old memory friend. I mean he does and I too from him but it’s so fast it’s unreal and most of the time driven into the background grim reality nothingnesses that happen. As for Carolyn, I know or imagine she has suffered as wife perhaps to justify any way she is now but I have strong impression she’s a kind of death—she doesn’t dig new things (statues or paintings when pointed out)—I mean she has no active curiosity or aesthetic or kicks interests and lives by this ruinous single track idea of running the family according to her ideas strictly, ideas which are mad copies of House Beautiful and are really nowhere in addition to being unreal on account of the horror of the house and the need for some real force of compassion or insight or love or Tao, or whatever. Maybe it’s impossible. She’s a hysteric type—that is, shifting layers of dishonesty which I first didn’t dig but do so now. Will take it or leave it, it is only my reaction to the general scene. I felt relieved to get out to poverty—work worries free of the mad hassle of anxiety at the house, alone in Frisco. And if I feel relieved to get out of a situation with Neal there must be something screwy somewhere. I know what I was doing there with Neal sounds on the surface like a monstrous thing, as Carolyn with some justice suddenly exploded out with, but that isn’t the cause of their woes, she forbade me by the way to ever see him again. I have horror of such insensitivity to the total situation insisted on as the right, self righteous final eternal etc. Oh well enuf of this it is too nasty and I can’t give the picture as I saw it. But I mean I felt evil around me—her vehemence and the feeling of horror I had reminded me of moments in the N.J. hospital when my mother was seized by a fit of frenzied insistent accusation and yelled at me that I was a spy. If you remember the story I told you about the sense of finality and absolute tired despair and hopeless futility I felt when at age fourteen I took my mother on a mad horrible trip to Lakewood where I left her to fall apart in paranoiac fear with shoe in hand surrounded by cops in a drugstore. I felt the same tired inevitability and impossibility of fact and mad horror listening to Carolyn, and afterward—tired exhausted feeling in the back, want to go off somewhere else from the impossible end of communication and sleep it off. That’s disappeared since I’ve been here running around, but it hasn’t disappeared in San Jose, for Neal who lives in hell and for her who lives in hell, and I guess the children.

  [ . . . ]

  Well, Bill writes he leaves Sept. 7 from Gibraltar and he’ll get here sooner or later. God knows what will happen. Jack boy now get on the ball. I will be trying to make it perhaps with Sheila, trying anyway. I will do everything I can for and to Bill, anything he wants, but the impossibilities of his demands are ultimately inescapable unless I let him carry me off forever to Asia or something to satisfy his conception of his despair and need. You must try and now straighten him out, you know. I’m not that [much] a bitch or unwilling to go to any lengths to help out. I do like him and would love to share a place with him here if it could be done which it will be, but he is going to be frantic and possessive you know. He was (against his own will) having tantrums of jealousy in N.Y.C., even over Dusty [Moreland] he was annoyed. The situation with Sheila will be a madhouse. I don’t know how to manag
e it. Bill will enforce his idea so much he will make me reject it and take it as a hopeless horror. He has of course calmed down a lot since midsummer, but he still puts all his life in my hands. Even I never went that far. So you must make him understand to go easy. It’s not a crisis of final communication, etc. Whatever it is—it is whatever he sees it as of course, except for the basic mutual bond which is so final and permanent which seems now unreal to him unless he possesses my very thoughts equal to his—it’s a real bitch man. So you must try to give him some kind of strength or Tao and O.K. hipness to the situation so that he doesn’t make a horror of it. I can’t be his one sole and only contact forever, I can only be his nearest and best. Well you know, whatever so long as everybody’s happy with the resources that are at hand. Christ what a situation. Surrounded by mad saints all clawing at each other and I the most weird? And tell Lucien to talk to Bill. He certainly knows about symbiosis and ought to have a helpful constructive word. As for me I am resolved to be patient and as un evil as I can manage.

  No time to describe—too tired—North Beach—characters—one mad Peter du Peru (who has gestures and same tone as Peter Van Meter and both are from Chicago). But Du Peru (what a mad Subterranean name!) is also like [Carl] Solomon a Zen ex amnesia-shock patient who wears no socks and is always beat and sensitive and curious and interested and has the best mystic mind I’ve met here. Digs me too. We talk—have walked together him telling me about various Baroque and Regency and City Hall weirdness of architecture all over S.F.

  And our friend Bob Young, why my dear I believe it is the very same little black angel I once did already make it with on E. 7th Street no less perhaps a year ago—ask him. Wears fine clothes? very sad sweet, yes it must be he, even the name I seem to remember. We met drunk at the White Horse. Actually a sad occasion, it made me shudder.

  As for the American Revolution it was a revolution wasn’t it? The “traditional dissenters”—well the Tories weren’t dissenting it was our forefathers, the Paines. But Hinkle (nor I) don’t favor revolution or conquest of U.S. by Red-East. Maybe Hinkle does, come to think of it. All I am saying is that the U.S. is in the hands of people like the publishers you hate and they are fucking us up in the rest of the world’s Spenglerian schemes. We should be feeding Asia not fighting her at this point. And if we actually do (for some mad reason) fight, it’ll be the end. The Reds are what Burroughs thinks they are—evil—probably—but enough bullshit on this. Yes, Al [Hinkle] is kind, and so Helen [Hinkle] too at time of crisis in Cassady household—they put me straight on the horror. I thought I might be going mad. They knew.

  No more long letters, but short notes occasionally when there’s news. Keep me informed on pleasant news of publishing. No space to talk about Shakespeare. I like your Tao, it’s more humane. I also have read some Chinese cloud mountain—for as said in the Green Auto “Like Chinese magicians, confound the immortals with an intellectuality hidden in the mist.” And my poem also by the way on Sakyamuni (who brought Buddhism to China) coming out of the mountain. I got most of my titles about it all from digging the pictures of the cloudy mountains and the sages that the arhats101 painted—dig dig dig at the N.Y. Public Library Fine Arts room the great collections of Chinese paintings—visions of the physical Tao, if one can get a spiritual insight from the painter’s material vision of the mountains receding into vast dream infinities series of mountains separated by infinities of mist. The paintings of the infinite worlds of mountains were my favorite, and next the great belly rubbing or beat or horrible looking W.C. Fields arhats in rags with long ears or giggling together over manuscripts of poems about clouds.

  Also there is a book, The White Pony, ed. Robert Payne, which is translation of all kinds from thousands years Chinese Buddhist-Taoist poetry—easy to read, such a pleasure, so many—and Bill Keck has my marked copy of this book, unless he’s given it to someone. Tell him “I ask him for Balloon’s sake to recover it and give to you if it’s not an impossible hassle”—if you see him.

  When you send me essay on Buddha? I read it with pleasure.

  [ . . . ]

  Give Gregory my respects. Say I said “The accurate measure of a free verse line is at present impossible (so as to make free verse stanzas and base lines to vary your free song from, like musical variation), but it is I think a beautiful problem to attempt to solve. I am interested in hearing any results on this still.” Give him my affectionate regards—tousle his head perhaps, poke his pap. He’s alright maybe.

  Remembrances to Kells. I’m a wandering Taoist Bum—as this Mex poem indicates—or would like to be if I could only escape this eternal fixation on the metaphysics of being one—tho I know that to be one you only have to forget it and let the thing and no thing whatever be. I am stuck on the paradox and can’t get it out of my mind. It’s a hang up block, my undoing. Madhouse.

  Where where—is Carl Solomon?

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to

  Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]

  before October 26, 1954

  Dear Jack:

  Confusion reigns! After an exchange of shocking letters Bill [Burroughs] seems to have come off the distraction-intensity. Now he’s down in Fla. My letter to him was perhaps too strong but subsequent correspondence has straightened out some of the bad feeling and left the whole situation a lot relieved. If you are interested, I do hope he comes out here, have always wanted him to, but not with the kind of hang up he had. I should know. Anyway, so he’s down in Florida. What happens next? His inheritance is disappearing on him—reduced to $100.00 per month or less he writes. Maybe can’t get to Tangiers. Not sure what to do. Doesn’t much want to come to California he says but also says he might like to under certain circumstances, etc. I wrote asking him to come out, offered fare back to Mex border if he wished to depart. And would pay rent in small apt. or room for him here.

  [ . . . ]

  I am living in a big crazy apt. on Nob Hill with Sheila [Williams] who incidentally tell Jerry Newman heard about him thru an ex-recording engineer friend of Brubeck who she knows. Al Sublette comes all the time and wines up or eats and talks and Sheila and he dig one another. She a sort of department store white collar Dusty [Moreland], but younger with a child and more a prey to girlish psychological semi-dramatizations (I’m an old man tired sort of, I can’t make the flux of love-illusions)—and undoubtedly the seeds of dissolution of this affair have already set in, now that we are established. I wish it were just quiet domestic so I could write. But there is the strain of Burroughs on my side and the strain of ex-lovers and department store cocktail friends and uncertain childlikeness on hers. God knows what’ll happen.

  [ . . . ]

  Because of Sheila and moving around and screwing and evenings full of North Beach and department store types (who are a drag) I haven’t written anything since I left San Jose. Things have finally settled down and I am back at work on book this week which is now ⅓ done about. Another month perhaps and I will send you copy called perhaps The Green Automobile. I sent your letter to Neal asking to see what you wrote him and haven’t got it to answer he didn’t reply—haven’t seen him since the heat went on and off again, all’s alright now again no threat.