Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

by Jack Kerouac

  Got the manuscript packet in mail.

  Jack Kerouac [Rocky Mount, North Carolina] to

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

  May 27, 1955

  Dear Allen:

  Here are the prose samples you asked to show William Carlos Williams. I’ll be proud as punch if he digs it.

  Lissen I wrote a full length Buddhist Handbook called Buddha Tells Us and here these rats in New York like, Lord says, “Is it any good?” when I spend my last two dollars long-distancing him, and then Giroux, who’d earlier asked to see my Buddhist works (NOT the others, he was careful to emphasize to Lord) now lets it be known via Lord that he’s changed his mind. Meanwhile the manuscript has been sitting neatly typed and ready and idle for a whole month. My sister who is taking over my business or the business managership of my scripts is disgusted and says we ought to pull the manuscripts off from Lord who hasn’t done anything and has the nerve to say that we overestimate Cowley yet it was only Cowley who’d done anything so far. Lissen Allen, if you have any ideas just let me know, and I pass them through the sister—let me know what you think of Lord—and if we really should show Subterraneans to Rexroth—I would like to show Subs to you in fact, typed, and fixed, and also to Williams.

  My Buddha book is a Lake of Light, really great, and guess what it is?—an embellished précis of the Surangama Sutra, just what the doctor ordered for you hey? a real simple explanation guaranteed to explain the inside secret of emptiness, how come, etc. Clear as day, look at the ground this morning and the ants in it and the plants springing out of it like fantasies and think “Bring to naught, destroy, exterminate . . .”

  Write soon as you can. Love to John. Am missing big times ain’t I? Well, I’m broke and sick (phlebitis)—If you want to get a Jack-California fund together I’ll hitch—would like to visit Santa Barbara monastery—**Be sure to dig the monastery at Santa Barbara for me on your way to L.A. or back—Be sure to reply about Bill where is he? What is he doing with the short story I sent him at cost of sixty six cents stamps? Neal and Carolyn and Cayce are all crazy. I guess it doesn’t take much intelligence to tell you why—Karma like everything else is only a dream, appears to be happening, is not really there . . . it’s all fantastic emanations from the Womb of Tathagata whatever that means and now my subject of thought—I mean, atom is made of nuclear protons and neutrons with outside electrons, and they themselves empty, empty, Karma Cayce is Ego-self-fool.

  J

  Be sure to tell W.C.W. I went to Horace Mann too.

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to

  Jack Kerouac [n.p., Rocky Mount, North Carolina?]

  May 27, 1955

  Dear Jack:

  [ . . . ]

  Send Subterraneans here for Rexroth immediate, yes, this is a good idea, and in any case no harm can come of it and it may bring some results. I would do this. Definitely.

  As to Lord your agent I guess the best thing is just to leave manuscript with him to work on and let him take his own time, apparently one thing I see, with these people, erratic behavior, or behavior which seems to them erratic, bugs them no end—Cowley (I hear from Rexroth) was bugged by your pseudonym shot in New Writing. But I think, seriously, the less talk about such the better with them, just let maybe them alone to work out fate. But who cares? Write all the big letters to Giroux you feel like, if he don’t understand them maybe someone else will in 12¼ years. Leave your manuscript with Lord, I would say, for the time being, and work on other channels as you can, as with Rexroth, taking what opportunities rise. Send me the Subterraneans. Or to Rexroth if you wish, his address is 187—8th Ave., SF. But best send them to me, for my vanity reasons, I guess.

  I guess best leave manuscript with Lord and forget about him till he writes you, but wherever you go send him notice of new addresses.

  What is cityCityCITY?

  I saw Williams here, he is old and sick, he asked me where I had been all this time, told me to send him new manuscripts, and I talked about you and Cowley (who is his friend) and Rexroth’s appraisal, and he said he’d like to see some prose, he’s really interested in it from your angle I think, see for instance the “Notes on the Short Story” and excerpts from his diaries published together in his Selected Essays last year, look them up maybe, he hasn’t your power but he has the true spirit of originality and understands it. So select a few (two or three or five) pages of pure any prose and send them to me, I’ll send them along with my own manuscript, or to him at 9 Ridge Road Rutherford, N.J. but here not for vanity reasons I suggest send them to me as his wife shields him from all strange correspondence, as his eyes are bad and she has to read to him I think. If he digs that prose he’ll possibly connect for you with his editor at Random House, name of McDonald or something. In any case I should like to have him dig you before he dies, so he will understand the true historicity of my letter in Paterson mentioning you and Melville, he thought it was just a crazy subterranean mention.

  Look up Kingsland in NYC for news of me—you said you were going there?

  I guess you’re going mad in a way, as the termination of the process of consciousness of vision or X or whatever should leave you beat before the absolute world not world as in Sakyamuni coming woeful out of the mount, nothing accomplished, but all finally understanded. I mean the absence of further inner effort, now, and what to do among all million things outside, but as Carl [Solomon] said “Everything that’s going to happen has happened already.” So DON’T FLIP, don’t hurt your body, take care of yourself now, rest from fatigue and figure what next to do. This my poor advice. Love abounds. Since the mind system cannot stop, and since body and consciousness remain, we’re limited to the absolute fact flat world around, and to the fact of our heart (human) loves and imagination, which latter cannot be destroyed, it pines too much. Can you come out here see me? I pray you do. I have an absolute extra couch here, have a big room, kitchen cheap food down the hall, and I have complete freedom and an income of $30 a week for next half year, which began only today, my first check. I have no money left except the checks, but that’s enough to pay rent and food for both, for leisure. How much do you need to get here? Write me that fast, I’ll see Neal and collect some cash from him for your visit, he’ll come across, gladly probably, he’s left his wife and is in town and freer than I’ve seen him yet. Yes absolutely come here. As for me I long to see you and this city is empty without you. Still, we can live quietly, I finish my book, and then we can maybe take off and once for all (I still dream of it) go down and conquer Hollywood. Yes that’s a project, and believe it can be done. Davalos will be back here in a month if you don’t see him in NYC. Over vodka we had a picture all lined up, he has a director, but we can connect maybe. Come, fantastic dream. There’s so much money down there, and no one with any beauty around to spend it as we might. In any case to share grating poverty with you for a season again would be a pleasure. Ha! to Lucien if you see him, Kingsland says he’s to be a father again soon. Or come out here and stay on my extra couch till you get your own pad. In any case what I have here’s yours. Also come here and teach me Buddha doctrines and poetry. Unhappy that self esteem should be so battered by outer neglect but since this is the condition of the craft, must survive it—and poor Bill in Africy without even our literary illusions to sustain him. Hasn’t he answered yet?

  Write me immediate how much $$ needed to finance bus or whatever way trip out here and I’ll go work on Neal for it.

  We can make radio programs together here—Gerd Stern has been urging me to and I haven’t yet.

  Love,

  Allen

  I am really as hopeless as you but expect to live another fifty years if not forever.

  Jack Kerouac [Rocky Mount, North Carolina] to

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

  June 1, 1955

  (drinking moonkind shocktails)

  Dear Allen:

  Okay, your letter convinces me I should come out, it was the b
est letter I ever got from anybody, your explanations about flat fact level world we have to face rather than try to mystic penetrate the X is rather good but I have another angle to explain to you, in person will be better, in any case for now let me say that “this world” is “X”—is a dream already a long time finished (as Carl says)—and salvation like everything else we can think about, is only an arbitrary idea. Being a Tathagata transformation oneself, you yield yourself up to all beings for the sake of their eventual emancipation—these beings and multiple million things are but manifestations, mere mental dreams, rayed forth from the Tathagata’s Womb (Christians will say, from God’s Mercy) so that his (the Suchness-Master-of-Holy-Honey)’s Compassion may be understood as rays as seen as working here is where . . . I fail a little with words . . . you have no more desires inside, tho outwardly you desire to desire, no passions, tho you may take or leave, you make no more discriminations (really inside mind you don’t care one way t’other, like New York Waterfront Tuff), and patiently you accept that you have no more ego (of course). “The life that you live thereafter is the Tathagata’s Universalized life as manifested in its transformations.”

  [ . . . ]

  In the solitude of the love life of reality—Truly you have nothing to do but rest and be kind and telepathize Samantabhadra’s Unceasing Compassion. Samantabhadra’s Unceasing Compassion is the transcendental sound of silence, hushsshhhhhh. The same Compassion is realizable in transcendental sight, the heaven rays of mothlight mentioned here. Transcendental thought is the Samadhi high thought, the Samapatti transformations and ray-ings . . . the other three transcendental senses, smelling, tasting, feeling, are on a more bestial level and on their level I do not know as yet how the Unceasing Compassion is manifested.

  So for krissakes send me $25 and I’ll hitch hike to Salt Lake City and from there ride Southern Pacific freights straight on in to the desert in Oakland . . . with a few free meals in Denver—en route—and we will all have ball—wine, women, and song—I’ll bring my brakeman’s lantern in case the railroad needs work for later for me—then from there, I’ll go on down to Mexico—My big hope is that we can go to Tangiers together and see Junoesque Proportions Burroughs and maybe we make it anyway—my mother dreamed last night that I sold Beat Generation to Hollywood for 100,000 dollars.

  I will, I have to go to NY to see Lord, Cowley, others, so I will look up [Dick] Davalos and say “Lookie here boy I want you to show Beat Generation to Perlberg and Seaton and tell em we’ll make a great script of it for screen with Dick Davalos as Dean Moriarty (as Neal) and Montgomery Clift as Sal Paradise (Jack) and Marlon Brando as LuAnne and Allen Ginsberg as Carlo Marx and our second production will be Burroughs On Earth.”

  Incidentally I have a concrete idea for Hollywood, it concerns a brand new writing form that combines novel with movie, the THE MOVIE NOVEL will explain—it will I think be the answer for you (and me) moneywise and Shakespeare-art wise—if anybody wants to do it—wait till I outline you the way—meanwhile, send that $25 and more if you can, if I had the bus fare I’d roll right on out now. As for my trip to New York, that’s on my mother’s poor $10 and I’ll have to hitchhike both ways and stay on Stanley Gould’s floor. Please write back at once, sending me John K [Kingsland]’s phone number and address, I called Kingsland last time and phone had changed. I will look up Kingsland, Davalos, and all. If you think the prose sample I sent you for Williams isn’t good enuf let me know and I send some thing even better. I would write you greater letter today but my eyes hurt and I write you one grand doozy next week before I start packing for your couch. O boy I can hardly wait for the kicks and the good old buddyhood you me Neal.

  I have phlebitis . . . but I think it will be gone in time for me to hitch hike to Denver . . . will stay there in Bev [Burford]’s basement, high . . . see [Justin] Brierly . . . then thumb on thru to Salt Lake Nealbirth City . . . Tell Neal, anything he might want done in Denver, like looking up his Dad, message, I will do, or anything else . . . Can you really get me that money? It means I can come out and be on the Coast with you and we go to chow mein together which is an old dream of mine and I want to dig Subterraneans Hep Frisco with you so much, Neal and I always goofed that end of Frisco with wild Folsom Street gogogogs . . . I really do believe now, that this world is just a mental dream rayed out from the Honey Womb of Heaven, even ugly lobsters know it . . . I say that, because, I have decided to go on wine and green again but not with goof, with conscious decision to remember center compassion I told you Holy Honey Nirvana and not get gone and hard on everybody (impenetrable lard-ass) because on green I always was ashamed of the natural kindness of my non-tea personality . . . natural, “forced,” but official, religious, gay kindness, like with Jamie and Cathy [Carolyn and Neal Cassady’s children] my wine-glasses and tapes and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? Or that the Mountain is a Pipi?

  Jack

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to

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

  June 5-6, 1955

  June 5, 1955

  Dear Jack:

  My twenty-ninth birthday having passed June 2, I woke up the night after a wine drunk 2 AM in the silence of the void, birthday nite, with “I filled with woes the passing wind,” concluding line of the mysterious Blake Crystal Cabinet: a poem I had never understood until that moment, as meaning he had dwelt in the crystal cabinet of his mind for years, but, though “another London there I saw”—I can barely complete a straight line of thought—when “with ardor fierce and hands of flame

  I strove to seize the inmost Form

  But burst the crystal cabinet

  and like a Weeping Babe became—

  A weeping babe upon the wild

  . . . . .

  And in the outward air again

  I filled with woes the passing wind.”

  This is another letter, I feel the most important of them since I am on the verge of true despair, and if only I could express . . . or better still accurately describe the mental state I am in, accompanied as it is with a sense of the void, headaches floating thru my brain like a thought for over two weeks now, at least since I return’d from Hollywood, and a daily wakening into the monstrous nightmare of my life, reminded continually by my own inevitable recurrent dreams that—but how can I express the desolation of the state, can’t hardly define it, the repetitions of meaningless thoughts, the sense of living in a dream, which must now end or be broken by some bleak harsh realization of a great mistake of consciousness that I have daydreamed within for decades, now I am passing like all others out of youth, into the world where everybody else is the same, faced with financial problems that must be solved or will remain to nag all the rest of allotted span of 60-70 years, wherein Art, what little of it I can eke out, for I am blocked and burdened by this emptiness and so for the time can find no other subject, and this a deadly one, no one’s interested and I haven’t anything to say except complain, trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, though I had a vast fantasy of writing a modern Crystal Cabinet, in modern verse, with a big dream structure from which I wake to express in the end the sudden warenessI had an angel for a friend

  evening wearied him with me

  midnight love came to an end

  waking in the morning light

  harsh and bleak he was a fiend.

  tho that’s too simple, silly.

  June 6, 1955

  Mostly my hangup with Peter, usual woes of lovelack, he won’t sleep with me, finally last nite I made it with the girl downstairs who loves me, I feel better today, because I worked myself in hole with Peter—you must consider him when you get here.

  And also finally a letter from Bill today, I hope its true: “Just back from a fourteen day cure in clinic—lost thirty pounds—usual plus a substantial case of the horrors. Still sick and sensitized to the point of hallucination. Everything looks sharp and different like it was just washed. Sensations hit like tracer bullets. I feel a great intensity bu
ilding up and at the same time a weakness like I can only keep myself here, back now in a doughy, dead flesh I have been away from since the habit started. I feel like I was back from years in a concentration camp. No sex. No hunger. Just not alive yet, but feel like I never felt before. Junk is death I don’t ever want to see it or touch it or commerce in it. Way I feel now I’d rather sell lottery tickets than touch The Business.”

  He also mentions, “I have a long letter from Jack,” and has by this time undoubtedly written you. It seems obvious from the above that it does make a difference what we do, that Bill has been in a hole as we all are, and that he at least for the moment, seems inspired with the apparent, obvious, need to do the necessary to get out of it. God knows what’s the obvious for me or you but the cessation of junk death seems to be the thing for him, I only hope it lasts.

  I sent your dreams to [William Carlos] Williams and also I sent with that manuscript a copy of twenty pages of Visions of Neal, “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog,” which I had typed up a while ago. That ought to cover a lot, if he can only patiently read it, it may be that his wife has to read to him, in which case not much will get through since she may not be as receptive as he, it may not work out, thru accident. I hope he likes it though I don’t know what he can do in his weak condition even if he does like it, it didn’t help me any earlier. But it would be nice to get some appreciation for what is written down.

  Neal seems not to be good for any money, or anything—he’s there all right but not reacting, to me, you, at any rate not outwardly reacting tho he does assure me he’s there and aware of me etc. but for instance I sit at his side all nite at The Place, a bar, and he plays chess, there seems to be nothing else interests him, and I feel helpless to invent any kick other to do with him.