Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

by Jack Kerouac

  [ . . . ]

  I will go write on your S.F. poems. They are nearer to center of poetry than elsewhere can be found but since my effort in last two years has been to find a formal look (as Cezanne said he wants to paint pictures that look like classics in museums, and did) your poems are satisfactory at special moments in them (Ted the F.B.I. for instance; parts of Neal in Court; other sketches from window). I’d rather not say anything till I go home. (It’s Friday afternoon in Montgomery Street office I am writing from) and look again—when they seem formal, too, as well as naked.

  Sheila hates me because I am a stuffy old nay-saying abstractionist and not a Dostoevskyan lover. I screw for the first time regular these days by the way, what a relief to come home to. I hear Burford (and Baldwin?) put Bill and me down. What’s wrong? I don’t see why Burford should come on that way unless as Ed White said in Dusty’s apartment he’s just a continental snow-job specialist.

  [ . . . ]

  I’ll write subsequently,

  Allen

  Bill said you were angry at me because of my letter to him. You should not be—I am doing all in my power for him. If I had not written so he would continue in state of tragic self-pity absorption perhaps. Even Bill knows at heart.

  Editors’ Note: Ginsberg had been afraid that if Burroughs visited him in San Francisco, Burroughs would want to take over his life. Allen loved him as a friend, but did not want to be his lover, so he was angry when Kerouac wrote Burroughs and told him Ginsberg wanted him to come to visit.

  Jack Kerouac [Richmond Hill, New York] to

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

  Oct. 26, ’54

  Dear Allen:

  Thank you for writing and implying that you forgive me and had gotten over that rage for a poor little kind white lie I told Bill—to make him feel good, almost droning like an old Grandmaw, I just said “He really secretly wants to be with you as before otherwise you see Bill he wouldn’t write and discuss and re-hash so much”—My true feeling was that maybe you didn’t want Bill anymore because he was become so strange and frightening and secretive.

  1. He paid absolutely no attention to anything I said especially about Buddhism—like Lucien he “couldn’t care less.”

  2. You should never have involved me in these judgments which relate to cupidities and concupiscences of homosexuals of which I am no expert.

  3. Burroughs does not respect my intelligence but what really is, he does not respect my power of deception.

  4. I am not going to deceive or conceal anything for anyone and I call now for all of us to return to Beat Generation 1947 confessions and honesties a la Lucien dawn drunks of truth.

  The “white lie” was spoken to Bill for Bill—I was also well aware you wanted straightness with chick and also told Bill. I don’t know what he wrote you, (about my opinions.) “Canuck unsaintly” prescribing liaisons for you not meet for me, how come, who is the queers around here, now really—how could I make sex with Bill and so what is un-meet about an old lover re-loving him? I mean, why did you get so mad? Are you sure it isn’t Neal but you’s crazy? I think you were distracted and your severe formal reject letter to Bill I know was written in distraction. I don’t want to be unkind and I don’t want to fight and I don’t want to be misunderstood as “mean”—But I do think we’ll need a serious mutual confession and admit the new backlog of secret hates we have for each other that if not uprooted will grow, [ . . . ]

  [Bob] Burford did not put you down, on the very contrary is deeply respectful and wants to hear from you at once—care of American Consul or Burford, c/o L’Eau Vive, Soissy Sur Seine, France—he was knocked out by Visions of Neal, the A.A. Wyn part and wanted to take Beat Generation Road to Knopf but my agent is jealous of interference and I hope I didn’t goof by sticking to agent’s judgment—God he’s, it’s slow—that Cowley article shoulda done it don’t you think? Book is at E.P. Dutton’s—[James] Baldwin put Bill down, not you, saw Bill’s manuscript somewhere.—Tell Al Sublette I met a great new pianist called Cecil Taylor, plays like [Oscar] Peterson gone Classical, fast runs but Brubeck-Stravinsky-Prokofieff chords, a Juilliard classicist—He, like Baldwin, colored, I think gay,—Baldwin is gay. I don’t dig all this gayness. Burford put Bill down, says “If I believe in evil, he is evil.” Burford says only other evil person he knows is Temko (!) (?)—I put [Eric] Protter down, was drunk there.—Bill has your poems—I think they are great, whattaya want Whitman to think of Melville.—

  [ . . . ] I think Cowley should see Naked Lunch. I’m going to show Sax to [Alfred] Kazin, he was on air recently, TV, talkin about Melville stuttering breathlessly and great. My San Fran Blues poems did you know were all writ spontaneous fast? that’s point. Not too good, really nowhere I’m sure, except some . . . images thin. Who cares? My poetry is prose lines.

  I just took trip to Lowell, whole Duluoz Legend all thirty-five volumes of it flamed in my brain—should I bother with so much repetitious detail? haunting castle above my birthplace house I hadn’t seen since I was three . . . so that’s where Sax come from. In fact whole Lowell trip so vast I can’t even begin to draw breath to tell . . . later. I tired. Glad you wrote and ain’t mad and that I ain’t mad and now let’s rest in understanding. [ . . . ] Incidentally, if you have any questions and doubts about Luminous Truth, ask me. I am surer now than ever. As for Tao, it is just outer style, like in Mexico I be Tao hobo in beans and jeans, but etc. in other words, I have reached the Gnostic and apocalyptic certainty beyond all doubt and my mind is set to concentrate now to the end.

  Jack

  IMPORTANT! (writ after twelve hours sleep) I had $30 cash in my desk for a winter leather jacket and Bill took a cab to Richmond and looked crazy and wanted money (for Ritchie) and took it all—Instead of paying it back he went to Florida—Doesn’t even write now—I don’t have his address—It’s getting winter and no coat for poor old Poe—send me his goddam address—I’m not the one with incomes around here. That’s really my mother’s money.—I want that money back.

  Incidentally what happened to those power of attorney papers you have? My agent Sterling Lord is also planning to publish me in France in French and will handle everything. Unless he’s a secret agent for Giroux, who recommended him.

  So what else?—Looks like Neal has finally drowned in the plans of Karma-making Gea—we’ll see him no more I’m afraid. (so all’s fucked and lost).

  J.

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to

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

  Nov. 9, ’54

  Dear Jack:

  My rage was annoyance but I generally understood and took it as a minor thing. Certainly not enuf to make me think of not writing. Yes Bill has become too strange for me to live in such close quarters with—not absolutely frightening but I knew it would end in some kind of absolute sad idiocy, particularly with me off all the time with Sheila [Williams]. But even without chick, too much. Still I invited him finally to come here, I didn’t want to put him down at soul. We are corresponding again. He’s more distant. It’s easier to read his letters. How hard it all is—I have to confess that as far as I’m concerned I dig Bill as ever and have no objection to anything and feel like an ego fool for the whole season but what could I do or should or whatever? I don’t care really about straightness with chick or anything like that—I first knew he’d come here and I’d get him all involved and vice versa and there’d be a bust with the cops ultimately and I’d be coming late to work and have to sit and listen to him and routines mercilessly applauding and so on. I wasn’t interested enough, I might be sometime when I want to return to saintly solitude and brotherliness to Bill. I lack solitude here and Bill is a power of solitude—got to give him all attention, I had my attentions turned in other (lesser) directions.

  [ . . . ]

  Sure I’m crazy. I begin at the local analytic clinic tomorrow—$1.00 an hour. Don’t bust a gut.

  I’m not a devil neither are you, stop
saying things like that. I just thought you were on an angelic type jig so to speak, gleefully siccing Bill on—but really he’s so far gone or was, you might just as well have humored him. In the long run the same thing that made you tell him white lies—the same madness—made me yell at him. I did everything I could not do for half a year.

  [ . . . ]

  Because of living in splendor with girl I do no reading no writing. Probably coming to the end of this, I’ll move in a month or so and get secret nice pad on side street run-down height of Nob Hill I’ve elected, under a great concrete basement of the next top-of-hill block for $35 a month save money and read and write and pray to solitude. [ . . . ]

  [Kenneth] Rexroth has Bill’s book reading it. He advises at New Directions. He invited me to reading poetry at a series he’s a manager of connected with a college here. [W. H.] Auden, [William Carlos] Williams, local poets including me. Sometime next month perhaps.

  Damned [Jordan] Belson read Yage and put Bill down, refused to read Queer [ . . . ]. What madness inspires these semi-ignus? He gave me some peyote, I got hi with [Al] Sublette and Sheila and we dug S.F. midtown cable cars clanging skyline—looked out my living room vast window down into the bldgs.—especially the Sir Francis Drake hotel—which has a Golgotha-robot—eternal—smoking machine crowned visage made up of the two great glass-brick eyes on either side (the toilets men and women of the Starlight Room)—upstarting out of the paved mist ground—I wrote on it.102

  [ . . . ]

  Bill is at 202 Sanford, Palm Beach. He writes: “Oh God I owe Jack $30 and don’t have it to send him. He will be hounding me like Friendly Finance. I feel so guilty I can’t bring myself to write him.” Write him a Friendly Finance letter maybe. He by the way you know (So doth the fixt foundation change) no longer has $200 per month—now only $100. How will he make it? I owe him $60, which I’ll pay in a month.

  [ . . . ]

  What of yours has been published so far or accepted?

  As to Neal: Since I been settled down here he comes by every week to borrow Miss Green or bring Miss Green [marijuana]. Last few times rushed in and out with Lucien, a high grotesque black man from Howard St., his pimp for Miss Green, unrolled her on the floor and proceeded to manicure and blow in midafternoon while I wandered around turning on and off lights and carried garbage downstairs and picked up child’s toys. One thing I must say, I can see what a strain it has been for him to try and maintain a family household and at the same time run a mad pad. Sheila digs him, of course, but he’s been very good about not coming on with her. [ . . . ]

  Well Neal says I should write you for him. He is always rushing around. So he keeps telling me—“you know what to tell him, we’re buddies, etc.” He will be cut off the R.R. sometime early January. He wants to go to Mex City for kicks for a week or a few days, then go booming in Florida, and then go rush up to N.Y.C. for a day or two and then return to Frisco to job. Carolyn threatens to quit if he goes booming, wants him to get a filling station job in Los Gatos. He as yet seems undecided whether or not he can get away with it, but he’s been talking about it since I first arrived. So he wants you to know his general plan. I don’t think I’ll go with him to D.F.—Scared of his driving, and I’ll be working still, then, I suppose. Saving $ for Europe or the East. Anyway he wanted me to write you for him. Consider him. He’s up for three investigations, everybody on the R.R. whispers about him blasting, “everybody knows I’m a cunt hound,” Carolyn hasn’t laid him in three months. I’ll tell him I wrote. He seems lately a little cooler however than in the Hotel Marconi days—a few months ago. I even played him a game of chess. He’s taught chess to Sublette and half of North Beach. Sublette beat him. He’s still on Cayce, will bring it up out of nowhere on every visit. If I say something other than Cayce he says with a forbearing smile, “Well that’s because you don’t really understand Cayce.” [ . . . ]

  What is happening with yr. art? Send me, yet, the Buddha book to read.

  [ . . . ]

  Love,

  Allen

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to

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

  November 26, 1954

  Fri

  Nov. 26

  Dear Jack:

  Last nite walked drunk [Al] Sublette over Chinatown at 3 AM to Hotel Marconi and packed him up for farewell to his fine window overlooking the corner Bway and Columbus and skyline ranging out above. Taxi to Pier 37 and aboard the Santa Lucia for him to South America, Acapulco and Chile. He staggered around lugging his sides [records] and record machine and I with two valises and then we wandered around the ship. I guess my next big move will be to ship again. Maybe sometime in spring and also as a yeoman or perhaps see if I can get a purser type shot and make money. Certainly to Europe in one and half years. Poor Bill’s left by boat I guess, supposed to the 20th and I haven’t heard since the 17th. What a sad mess. Amazing to think that (as I am sure) our relationship will suddenly have changed to some strange distant Bill distance in Bill—perhaps no longer the eager Bill of before (I mean a year ago, two years ago) with mutual ignu marks and stars. He feels maybe that I am a paranoid [Hal] Chase suddenly cutting off his finger, unforgivable, and will no longer be able to address me without self-consciousness. But I suppose if we were to meet again in some dark corner of a Kasbah we’d be all right understanding again with no thought of this woe. And how different will I feel toward him having “as it were” tweet tweet found a limit to what I would do for him and by implication for you or Lucien or Neal, and by implication vice-versa. Almost an F. Scott Fitzgerald disillusioning. And what would I do with a pilgrim soul if I did find a real one here in S.F.? I said to Sheila last night, in the middle of a hassle about why I don’t love her really. I thought maybe because I loved men too much, but do I do that any more like I used to?

  Neal came by the other nite and got me hi and I fed him, Sheila slept, we talked, he went out to wander in North Beach. Not much work on RR, off longer periods of time. But every time you talk to him as soon as it gets interesting he suddenly turns a switch in his head and the CAYCE Jones Locomotive blackens the horizon—he begins repeating the same ideas, more simplified and unrelated (whirling around fragments of former perceptions and mad thoughts) in answer to anything that he thinks about for more than 37 seconds. It all gets channeled. Except for chess, as he complains, cunt and chess and Cayce, beyond that he’s a blank, can’t listen to a paragraph of writing easily, nor read, hardly seems to notice the weird Chinese paintings I prop up for his delight on the table, says “uhhuh.” Then looks up and sadly says, “Can’t concentrate any more—except on chess.” I can’t concentrate enough to like write you a letter, he feels sorry, he wouldn’t write me, no one, couldn’t except a line a year, “well how’s the old boy?” Said situation with Carolyn [Cassady] worse, now he no longer even shared room, but sleeps on the couch. This may be coming to some kind of break. She also has suspicious notions about me. He said he had “made the mistake of showing her this Miss Green” and she went into a rage accusing “Ginsberg of feeding it to him.” The Hinkles were by and said she was continuing war against me in my absence, I mean real absence from the scene even in Frisco, I so seldom see him, alas. I really don’t think she’s all right Jack, maybe she’s come to bugged end with him, but there’s real nastiness coming out of her. Helen Hinkle, his old confidante up in arms against him—he comes around and plays chess with Al, all the time, bugs Helen tho why I don’t know except jealousy, so she threatened to tell all his confidences to Carolyn unless he stopped coming and playing chess incessantly. Invited to come without chessboard. Nevertheless I do notice that when at my house he seems subdued and very warm, tho perhaps preoccupied, but very gentle and old friendly—the only franticism is the occasions he rushes in hardly without saying a word or inquiring whether squares are present with big black connecting Lucien spade and begins rolling huge mounds of Miss Green squatted beside green coffee table on white shag rug in my great living r
oom. But after that’s over (he often cursing, demanding paper, not sullen but bugged with his green, sometimes shortchanged and angry) he sits down over coffee like an old uncle, tho doesn’t say much.

  Well anyway, Jack, I’ll be leaving here Tuesday nite December 14 and get to NYC noon Wednesday. I’ll have to make it around with family since my brother [Eugene Brooks] sent me plane fare to make his wedding. But I won’t spend much time, a fast visit to Paterson maybe Thursday afternoon, visit my brother Wednesday afternoon. Where will you be Wednesday night? I’d wish you to make the plane field but its a nonscheduled flight and I’m not yet positive when exactly it arrives where. If I find out I’ll let you know. Anyway I stay around till Sunday evening and catch return plane then. Wedding is in Riverside cathedral?? NYC Saturday nite. So I’ll be around Tues Nite, maybe Wed nite, Thurs Fri and Sat and Sun. Please leave time free to see me, we will make all the possible scenes, Montmarte and Village, Lucien, Kingsland, Dusty, ah Love. How I’d love to fuck Dusty again. I don’t know where I’ll stay, maybe Dusty or Luciens or my brothers or Kingsland or Greenwich hotel. I’m sure it will be a sad four day ball. Write me before I leave here so I know you’re in town and don’t have to worry about seeing you. I’ll bring many poems, a note for you from Sublette, a note from Neal, the address of Sheila’s girlfriend to look up, etc. I saw the Cowley chapters. Too objective and tentative, “this one and that one fits into such and such scheme of things,” what horrors.

  Love,

  Allen

  My appearance has changed a little—I have good tweed suit and close cropped head and gaunt perhaps rocky face. Amazing I get more beautiful as I grow older, thank god. A curious P.S. but I’ve been all hung up on the temporary miracle—Sheila thinks I’m beautiful—for two weeks. Her opinion’s not worth too much but I feel that way anyway.