Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

by Jack Kerouac

  Yah, Yah, and Sterling Lord sent us big fat check for $450 last week. O how delightful, thank you very much, how noble that we all have that easy money thru your typings and friendlies. I also got some money from City Lights so I have $600 and will take slow trip home in drive-car-east for someone if can find car needs driving and see Death Valley and Grand Canyon, be home June mid-most. And Bill says he’s coming to NYC late June or July—and Don Allen says he’ll try arrange an advance for Bill thru Grove to cover round-trip boat-fare. Burroughs now in Paris fled from Tangiers—police after him there on suspicions, but nothing real so he’s alright.

  I’ll try bring Phil Whalen up, east, with me, he’s broke anyway now and has nothing to do here but get job which he doesn’t want to.

  Gregory wrote me nutty postcard after I sent him $40 saying Nicholson144 had given him 675$ is that true?

  When you leave for Fla?? Bill probably come down there to see Willie [Burroughs’s son] so you’ll see him.

  Giving reading here with all the poets, Wieners, McClure, Whalen, Duncan, etc etc. to raise loot for Measure mag. and also giving free reading at the Mission, and then I’m done with all reading for good for years.

  Do you want the Kaddish for your Avon Book?145 Big Table and Yugen have parts, and [Stephen] Spender asked me for it all for Encounter but probably can’t since mags already have it. Let me know if you want it for Avon. How you coming? It must be a lot of heroic beer. Let me know whatever you want from me. Maybe the politics poem?

  Don Allen has a lot of material he assembled from SF too. Duncan has a beard and looks like Whitman and rough and bearded and lives isolate on the coast and comes to town once a week to dentist and is much more vigorous than before, less pansy aesthetic, loudervoiced, grey hairs in beard—much better appearance. Just as stupid tho. And met [Brother] Antoninus who was always looking like ready to cry, and talks squeezing his hands in crotch in black suit bending head down low to the floor and whines. Strange pipple. Weather here just like Tangiers. Bright sky and bay. I saw Neal thrice in S.Q. [San Quentin], he’s hung a little on his martyrdom doom of five-to-life for three sticks. and not people to organize pro-marijuana societies.

  Love,

  Allen

  Gavin Arthur, teacher of Neal’s S. Q. religion Saturday morning class is doing my horoscope. I read “Caw Caw” there and all the cons go around in cells now saying “Man then really wails—Caw Caw.” Next week I go down to Stanford to take LSD 25.146

  Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York] to

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

  May 19 ’59

  Dear Allen:

  Please forward this to Neal, I don’t know his “number” and also, when answering me, please, send me Neal’s entire address. Read letter then seal. It’s just a little note.—So much mail in my room I can’t sit. Will you ask Ferlinghetti if 5,000 additional words of “Old Angel” enough? They are written and ready to mail, also the cover (ink and pastel, weird). But that goddam [Irving] Rosenthal has not gotten our release for Old Angel yet! And never paid me $50 token as promised! What IS Irving’s ax address?

  Glad about typewriter. Now Neal can work. And he will. I never saw NY Post review of Sax, musta been awful, but Time waxed good. Time likes to be put down, Dennis Murphy threw them off porch and they gave him swell review. Had we ever mailed that madletter to Lipscombe? Didn’t see Diana Trilling’s, heard much sick reaction everywhere even Wesleyan college where on whim went to accompany Gregory and had big fantastic time almost endless to describe. I danced with teenage girls in shorts, like a kid I was (they had shorts) . . . Wesleyan is run, I mean led, the boys are led, by two strange Russian jews with phony names (Charley Smith and the guy who wrote the introduction at the reading). I told them we would convert Moscow or something. I was a bit silly. Mason H. [Hoffenberg] drove us back in hotrod to Persia New Haven. I autographed twenty Saxes and Roads and Subs, etc. with all weird poems in them and drawings by Gwegowy. I banged piano. I wrestled wrestlers in the grass. Gregory went to a picnic with three hundred girls while I slept. We had to flee. The reading: G’s “Bomb” reading made me weep (quietly), I read “Doc Benway” to roars of laughter, read just like Bill does. Also read last two pages of Bums. Got nice letter from Gary Snyderee. All’s well. I leave for Fla. I don’t know, six weeks or so, I guess, will see Bill in NY I guess. With Whalen also in town we better cool it, Gregory almost started race riot in Seven Arts when Negro slapped him, mad Italian rage, Lucien and Cessa were there. Our movie ([Robert] Frank) is best movie I seen. Germans buying it. Also TransLux chain I guess. But it’s all too much and I’m afraid now, we gotta get out of NY. Arch Washington Square on Sundays crowded with thousands of beatniks. Thru which Gregory and I and Persian and Stanley Gould walk highdown billkick. Why don’t you write a new poem about jet plane adventure for Avon anthology. Please tell McClure and McLaine that I rec’d manuscripts and that anthology people at Avon are slow. Write new poem for me, or anything you want. Antonius [Brother Antoninus] sounds great. Reading at SQ [San Quentin] a triumph of your prophetic soul, boy. You were prophetic right about Sax too, Sax instead of Mad Avenue Winking Wiking Pwess. Caw Caw. You’re the hippest kid. If Irving Layton or whatever his name is, I mean Lawrence Lipton knew how hip it is to be hip like you . . . ah shit, that book is awful, all about his own barefooted bearded non-working art friends who don’t write but just talk and show off and the things about us who started it all are pejorative. Holy Barbarians is the first full-scale attempt by the communist party to infiltrate the Beat Generation, and please tell everybody I said so, if you want. I don’t want to have anything to do with no communists: tell them to leave my name out of it. And they even can get poor innocent pure jazz musicians in hot water: their awful hot water of hatred. You and I and Burroughs and Gregory and Peter believe in God and TELL THEM THAT, YELL IT! (Burroughs said so in Word.) (But why was it deleted from original manuscript of Word, which I have here)?—God is what everything is. Everything is a vision of God’s mind which is No-Mind. When people are shitty it’s because they don’t know. don’t know this. And God in his mercy gave me alcoholism instead of leprosy. Got big mad letter from Lamantia in Mehico. Also an enormous huge spread in Copenhagen Denmark paper with big pictures of me and [James] Dean and [Norman] Mailer and all about you inside and all in Danish. Saw John Holmes, okay, we went to opening of awful Nervous Set musical by Jay Landesman, music was good, story itself is middleclass play about lumpenproletariat beatniks. Condescension dripping from stage. The beatnik himself a silly fool. Jay was sad. But he will get his money back anyway, it’ll run about six weeks. Why don’t somebody produce my angelic play I wrote? Why don’t Hollywood buy my angelic Road if they want beat movies? What’s going on, Allen? It’s not money I’m worried about any more, but the perversion of our teaching which began under the Brooklyn Bridge long ago? Gregory and I also crashed in on Jay Laughlin, and on Richard Wilbur, and I got Samuel Greenberg poems for anthology (from Mr. Laughlin). I haven’t even had time to write my new column. I’m not going into NY any more, except when Bill gets here. I have a broken leg. All day yesterday I was wearing a hat that wasn’t on my head (tell that to Creeley).

  Goombye.

  Don’t steal that hat. I want it. Grook. Yak. Kitchen yakkings. Not important. Come on. Besides soon we’ll part, later grow old, die, you won’t even be at my funeral . . . we’ll remember with tears. I’m sorry I hurt you. Our lives are no longer ours. So we’ll go home. Far away. Goldclime. Don’t waste your energy on the frenzies of mediocrities. Genius is Calm. Whalen is a Genius. Caterpillar genius. Peter is a Saint. So sleep. Write hymn for me.

  Jack

  Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York] to

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

  June 18 1959

  Hello Mike!

  Dear Allen:

  Received all your poems and everybody’s poems, Whalen’s etc. (including your recent batch with Burroughs letter enclosed) so all is set except t
he kind of mad man who is the editor at Avon who keeps taking me out on binges that always end the same way with him flipping beating his girl who cries on my shoulder etc. I keep getting the feeling the anthology will never out, he’ll kill himself or something (insane Tom Payne) . . . I told him and told him to rush on this job because I’m leaving but he does nothing, so it looks like I’ll have to write my running commentary on the (now) two anthologies (have that much material!) in Florida or even Mexico since I’m leaving Northport here within a month . . . actually might get it all done at last minute. Will leave present pile at Sterling’s. If this guy flips (and W. R. Hearst just bought Avon Books!) and everything falls thru I will be accused by all the poets of stealing their manuscripts! But I’ll have to mail them all back at my own expense. The trouble with these (like you sad) (said) guys in “business” (Payne is the guy who wrote that letter about the disastrousness of publishing Sax at this time) is that they don’t have the quiet serene sense of work-accomplished that we “beatnik” poets have, they flip and let everything go to pot!! I could have all this anthology, both of em, ready in two days if he’d simply send me his batch, which I would collate with my new batches, tack on commentaries, and send to printer!—Anyway, we’ll see.

  Allen, Hanover records who made my Steve Allen record now want to advance you $500 to make an album with them, in NY here, also they want Gregory. So there’s your money you need! THAT could be your last reading.

  Sterling is going to be your agent in this deal anyway so write to Sterling and get all the details. He SHOULD be your agent or you’ll get screwed on subsidiary rights later on, so stick to him, he’s been fair and honest with me, and he is willing to arrange for Gregory too. The guy looking for you is Bob Thiele.

  Everything is too much, I’m trying to run away back to my quiet soul now but so many things hanging, so I turned down another album offer (was to cut it tomorrow) and turned down even articles with Playboy etc., I am mentally exhausted and spiritually discouraged by this shit of being of having to do what everybody wants me to do instead of just my old private life of poesies and novelies as of yore.

  I met Eugene your brother on the train and said I would like him to be my attorney in the closing sale of house but when I got back to N’Port it turned out the broker had arranged for local lawyer and I want to tell Eugene but lost his card and don’t have his address or anything, so tell him? He did send me a penny postcard with a completely illeligible illegible return address.

  Even Lucien came to get me last night for wild weekend in woods, can’t do it, have to concentrate on packing and escaping all this. Lucien said I had become strangely philosophical. I saw a snapshot of myself taken recently in which I could see with my own eyes what all this lionized manure has done to me: it’s killing me rapidly. I have to escape or die, don’t you see? I can’t get all hungup at this time on anything ANYTHING. So what I can do, as last thing, is ask Laughlin to write to Neal and offer him a job, okay. I haven’t even got the spiritual energy to write a preface to Visions of Cody like Laughlin wants.

  As for Jacques Stern, if he can write prose like Subterraneans and has imagination to conceive a Dr. Sax and the energy to write an On the Road and the spiritual fervor to write a Visions of Gerard, I’ll believe what Bill says about him. Sounds like he’s hypnotized Bill, to me, what with all the drugs too. There will be a great writer who will rise above us but I’m sure he will be a young American kid in about ten or twenty years, like after Melville and Whitman there came Twain. Don’t be discouraged by talk like that from Bill, he sounds jealous now. I’m so sick of being insulted by every critic and everybody and now even by Bill whom I lauded so much and put over so well at Wesleyan! Fuck him. Besides no Stern Jackes can write a “Bomb” like Gregory, I can promise you that. Have you seen Dr. W.C. Williams’ weird statement about Peter Orlov?—that we have a lot to learn from Petey?—in that new magazine put out by Willard Maas’ son? Somebody stole my copy of it. Wagner College magazine.

  Meanwhile, I hope I see you, when you get back just come with Peter to visit his mother and drop over, my mother won’t mind and we’ll say goodbye here. If you’re too late, I’ll see you in India or in Heaven . . .

  Hasn’t it been awful? We were so swingy? And now young poets are sneering at us? And saying that we’re merely mellow classics now? without even reading Sax and Kaddish? in fact they’re all screaming at the same time, how can they read?—Ho Ho!—I know what part of the blue sky. I go to . . . Ho Ho I’m happy. I’m happy to be free again . . . Ho Ho.

  Cruseke. fool him all

  Jean XXX

  Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to

  Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York]

  July 1, 1959 c/o City Lights

  Dear Jack:

  Living in dank hotel on North Beach last few days preparing to leave. Still working on Neal—endless complications, newspapermen with wisecracks and political connections, lawyers, etc. once I set whatever impulse I can going in the machinery, I’ll leave—just a few days. Laughlin wrote a beautiful letter, rapidly.

  Sorry I will miss you before July 4—the Fantasy record was slow making and then this Cassady dilemma. Maybe see you in Florida with Burroughs. Thanks for arranging deal with Hanover, but I’d already signed good contract with Fantasy and was working on the tape. They also sent Gregory $150 to Venice, he wrote he was in jail. You’re right to disappear to Florida and take it easy. All the poets here Duncan (who is a good poet) and the lousy ones are tearing me apart psychically with their joyless ambitions. John Wieners by the way—I heard him read his Hotel Wentley poems—it made me cry, they are classic like Hart Crane’s “Behind my fathers cannery works”—You have that book? He is a real poet, sad and damned and tender. I mean better than anything else here except Chances.

  Oh Bill must be a little nuts with dope now, that’s all, and Stern has him hypnotized by flattery and junk and yachts. Also Stern’s intelligent—they must be on some strange kick. Bill probably write disillusioned Mediterranean letters soon. Yes he forgets the art-devotion pact, and mellowness under ten year bridges. But he never dug that as much as mysterious sorceries with chemicals and psychic strange victories. So he’s doing fine up his alley. I saw the Wagner magazine, it was funny and full of attention, but it depressed me, nobody gets the joke. Williams on Peter is golden hearted though. I dunno why old English Anarchist [Sir Herbert] Read thinks we’re Nihilists, but he’s more sympathetic than most big shots.

  After a year’s stupidity I finally got the point—Peter’s typing his poem up with spelling mistakes. They’re part of the beauty of his soul I see. I was always trying to clean them up to be neat. So far, find what we got enclosed. There are some more but he types so slow and I only goof when I do them for him, tho I did type some.

  Anyway, we’ll leave here very soon, and in a car, with a few hundred $ from Fantasy, and swing into the West and wander hand in hand in small towns by deserts and forget the world awhile anyway, I want to see Grand Canyon still. We’ll drive over Yosemite Sierras and down the east side of the mountains and maybe thru Death Valley.

  From my LSD poem—take out that little section of lines “Gods dance on their own bodies . . . This is the end of man”—and put it separate as a little poem. It doesn’t belong in the LSD notes, I added it later.

  Keep Peter’s spelling the way it is, if it looks alright to you—change what you think necessary if any.

  I’m dragged and depressed by literary politics—my own fault for even getting involved at all—OK be free under blue sky soon. Flowers,

  Allen

  Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York] to

  Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York]

  October 6, 1959

  Allen:

  Truman Capote notwithstanding,147 I’m still catching up with the stuff I wrote by hand, am only now (like you) typing up Orlando Blues written in 1957, also busy. Running the anthology isn’t as hard as you think, I can answer [Marc] Schleifer148 myself, in
fact am doing so this minute, okay I can do whole thing by myself if you want. I thought you might need the money and ALSO have a better knack than me for picking up true gems and historical diamonds . . . more opportunity, that is, hanging around Village etc. Let me know what you secretly really feel you want to do about working with me or not on Avon anthology. The second number is already well set with Ed Dorn’s great new poems, his “Buck” story, with [Bob] Donlin’s great story, with [Herbert] Huncke’s new gems you mentioned (Huncke, all he has to do is keep writing those gempy vignettes and then we’ll have a whole BOOK and take it to Sterling)—(Peter too)—(you too). Tell your story, you lazy bastards, people pay money for stories not just easy pomes rattled off couches. Yes we can have Avon send back what we don’t want with big diplomatic notes by Preston or Payne, easy enuf. In fact Schleifer already recovered his manuscript and wants to bring it back again! You don’t have to visit Payne and bother him, do all by mail. As I say, I can do it alone—I am going to start writing longer smarter running commentaries for this material too—first time is short drunk notes—Time to get Tough, like Time magazine—SO MAKE UP YOUR MIND ABOUT CO-EDITORSHIP.

  What radio station will you be on with Mexcity Blues, when, date? I am going to H’wood Nov. 12th in train for 2 G shot with Steve Allen, want to read railroad prose or something—or from Visions of Neal about west—golden west—so won’t leave NY till then, go to Mexico after. Got a note and a poem from Creeley, will ask him for stuff for second anthology.