Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (15 page)

But the nicest stanza almost as good as “Pull my daisy, tip my cup,” goes:

“Cut my thoughts for coconuts” will someday be part of the speech of the world. Another contribution to city imagery—did you ever hear of the Alley-Mummy? I revised the poem “Who is the shroudy stranger of the night?” and the second stanza begins, “Who is the Walker, laughing in the street,” “The Alley mummy, stinking of the one . . . ?” Can't you just see him coming out of the garbage strewn, beery dank of Paterson and Larimer Street in the dead waste and middle of the night? He is lying there among all the broken bottles and rain soaked newspapers and bags, in the garbage can, wound in the soiled bandages some old man had wrapped around his legs, bound in old Kleenex and women's rags. Everybody knows how frightening alleys are—the dark alley, the dark corridor—think of all the street phantoms and gutter elves and roof gremlins there must be in the Kasbah. Also, did I ever tell you about the face in the television set, the poor ghost that calls to children in the living-room, “Please open the window and let me in”? I thought of him about half a year ago. I also revised the Psalms that I showed you at your house, they are almost an even poem now, and a lot of small lyrics and longer poems—all the nightingales—I retyped and cleaned up everything and in a few days I hope to have my book ready and I left a lot out, too, that was formless and passionate. Only complete poems—but even then, there are weak spots, long rhetorical diatribes about eternity and Light and Death that have no corporeal home, and no true form—but I left them in, some of them, because I hope nobody will notice that they are not truth. They are so pretty when I have finished I will really turn to something new—longer real poems about people, with plots—then poetic drama—a tragedy of light-doom-ridden Pomeroy [Neal Cassady]—Clem [Herbert Huncke] in the prison. In the hospital. But I am sorry that I did not try harder in the past to publish what I wrote, because I have small heart to send individual poems out to magazines in a full dress attack; and without previous magazine publication it is hard to get a collection of poems published. If I cannot get a publisher, and I still feel that I want to be read, I would print them up like Jethro [Robinson] did, myself—but I haven't any money in the hospital. Well, I'll see. Perhaps you will do me the honor of writing a preface, since near the time I am ready you will be a famous author. As I started to say, I finished the heaviest work this evening and was relaxing trying to be peaceful and serene, and I turned on the radio and picked up your last letter. The long paragraph ending with the Waving Mells of the Watched, I was surprised and moved by more than the first time I read it. The first time it seemed less like a profound call to the raindrops; and reading it tonight I felt just like a little raindrop indestructible being told by the sea to rise! Rise! and fly back over the Down-Alongs. Paterson is making some changes in me. I'm getting more thought about the Down-Alongs of the old houses I lived in, my schools, and childhood, my father. Also I've taken a slight historic interest in the town. You must locate the myth of the rainy night here, near New York, for do you know there is a snake hill with an actual real castle, a castle, overlooking the city? And a river in the middle of the town? The castle was built by old Mr. Lambert in 1890 or so, and has a history much like yours, but now it belongs to the park system of the County and is a vast and crazy museum of art objects imported by Lambert (great Titians and Rembrandt visions and Reynolds ladies, Italian statuettes, medieval Bacchuses) mixed with hundreds of items of local importance having to do with Passaic County—it is a treasure house with a long history—(Paterson was settled before the revolutionary war). A poet named William Carlos Williams, incidentally, is using a lot of this. There are old bronze dogs that used to hang over a shoemakers shop in 1840, maps of the great wild Passaic falls, bustles from the 1870s, lampposts from the 18th century. The castle is an immense turreted place (half of it was torn down a few decades ago) on the slope of a mountain 5 minutes from town and far away—and on the top, away from the castle, is a huge stone tower, like a dungeon tower from Annabel Lee, overlooking all the valley to the dim spires of New York beyond the Palisades. You can see it from the downtown area—but nobody ever goes there, much. And on the top floor lives the museum caretaker and his wife. And also, Mr. Hammond, a silly old lady who is the principal of School 16 and Chairman of the park system, has an office there, and is a great specialist in Passaic County marginalia. (I know all these people, incidentally—it might surprise you how well known my father is here as Paterson's principal poet—and I have met all the mayors and newspapermen and schoolteachers and bank officials and rabbis at one time or another. Someday I will be free to wander here and give an account of the growth of the demon-child in the Silk City (that's what Paterson's called—we used to make silk products before the depression).

I am as I say, still waiting to go to N.Y. [the mental hospital] and it ought to be soon—there was a little hitch last week. I don't know what has become of the other defendants—I am sheltered and isolated, and don't need to go out of shelter. I called Claude [Lucien Carr] up last week—he's O.K., congratulated me on the efficiency and cleanliness with which I'd seen my case through to a successful end—a surprise, pleasant—for him to congratulate me as if I were the sensible brains behind what is happening. I guess he's congratulating me (without knowing it) for leaving my hands off and accepting whatever my lawyer does on his own in the upper spheres of legalistic huckstering. It was a nice feeling, being told by Claude that I'd done well in an affair of the world, so I accepted the compliment. Otherwise I know little of him. He did write his short story, said “Christ, you waste more time fiddling around, looking for cigarettes, than you actually put in writing. Being an artist,” he said, “is easy if you just mind your business and get it over with.” Those aren't his words, but near—he meant, or said, it wouldn't be so bad if you could get down to it. I will call him again soon. He says he is going out with a girl, but not completely coed or something; I didn't get him to talk about that over the phone.

Adieu. Write to Denison [Burroughs]—if necessary (have you his address?) care of Kells,
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at Pharr, Texas. I want to know what's with him. Give him news from me. Tell him conditions are not propitious for a letter from me, but that I think of him. Also say I am liable to be silent for a considerable length of time, until I know in what sphere I am alive. Find out how he is. Please do this now, Jack.

Write me here. Has your family arrived? Are you all settled? It seems to me if you could as a veteran, you might get a loan for a house, and pay that out, instead of paying $75 a month for rent—but you have a lease, I see.

I enclose the ticket to the museum.
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Do you know that Lenrow is an ignu? He gave me the ticket to keep, instead of throwing it away; he not only realized that in my romantic way I would seize on the unused ticket as an object of nostalgia—but he offered it to me, with a pleasant comment about the possibility of my wanting it.

But, incidentally, the word Ignu is only for the Dennisons and Pomeroys of the world.

Also find a clipping from a magazine article on folk singing.

Oh lordy, dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones . . .

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac [Denver, Colorado]

 

June 15, 49

 

Dear Jack:

I got your letter today, so add this as a postscript to one which I wrote yesterday, and [the one] which you received a week ago. Great news: Pomeroy [Cassady]'s address in Frisco is 29 Russell St. I got a letter from Goodyear Service requesting information, so I sent them a recommendation of his vigor and imaginativeness, congratulating them on their association with him, assuring them he'll give them satisfaction. Reminds me of the time he told [Hal] Chase's woman to leave a note in her box. Poor Pomeroy, imagine him depending on beat out refugees like me to be his solid stable reference. Oh, what we dancing masters don't have to endure. Well, write him; I will not (as with Denison [Burroughs] or anyone else) for a time; maybe just a couple of months. Give regards, explain events. Also, my lawyer tells me that I have been cleared by grand jury; no indictment, though Melody, Vicki, and Herb were indicted. I was not at hearing, did not even know it had taken place till later; fine lawyer is keeping me away from all the melee; all the war goes on in upper airs. Apparently an analyst, Van Doren, Mr. and Mrs. Trilling, and Dean Carman
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had to be present and speak; I don't know any details. But I must say that's mighty cricket of them all. I was really worried last month; and I had reason to be, except for work of others who assumed all the burden. I feel grateful. Shouldn't I? That's what Van Doren means by society I suppose; people getting together to keep each other out of trouble (or away from tragedy) till they got an inkling of what they're getting into. Do you know, incidentally, that 22 years ago Van Doren wrote a little book on Light and E.A. Robinson, “It is not good, one can imagine Mr. Robinson saying, to know too much of anything; but it is necessary for great people thus to err—even while it is death for them to do so. Tragedy is necessary.” He ends beginning half of book so. In and out are comments like, “Bartholow, in other words, has seen too much; he is blinded by his light.” And “I have spoken more than once of the image of light as being the image in which he saw life reflected. The six poems are all concerned with men who have seen a light and who are both punished and rewarded for doing so.” I believe that Van Doren is talking about that specific miracle of vision which I have attempted to point to and specify the last year; his poems are about it; and in conversation with him it seems so; but since 22 years ago he has gone on beyond that light and seen its relationship to the world of time or “sober but hateful sanity”; I say gone on beyond not to mean that he has abandoned it or it him, but that it has assumed a new significance beyond its original occasional appearance as the actual existence of some transcendent fact; perhaps he has learned to see eternity in human laws, to put it bluntly, and god's ways in organized society; perhaps he even believes now without a further thought any, even to us weak willed, complaint against lawbreakers and holds the lawbreakers responsible for some outrage against other men which they really were aware of; and if they (like me) were not aware of it it's just as well that folks give them “a good slap in the face, so that they can hear the ring of iron.” The quote is from his lecture to me. Maybe he sees me and the hipsters hassling against society while cream and honey pour down unnoticed. Maybe he thinks its all a big secret joke, and that the trouble with me is that I am taking it (and myself) too seriously. In fact, these are his opinions. However he had an exaggerated idea of my self hood based on what recently he had been told by Hollander
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and others about my fancying myself as Rimbaud. Oh those pin-heads. Yes, he thinks I am taking myself too seriously. Is there anything more hateful to hear from a wise man? Jack, your book is a big balloon, you take yourself too seriously. And its true. O Lord what temptations thous placest in the way. Deliver me from my own thoughts and the thoughts of others, too, I think Van Doren probably thinks almost the same as you, that it's all a matter for the giggling lings, so what's all this intense investigation of evil.

Remember the discussion about prayer we had? I had this week a trembling on the edges of revelation again, and came up with a fish, half flesh, half abstract; no real revelation so no true fish (incidentally I do not believe that I will have any more guideposts of Light given free for a while now). I have been praying previously for God's love; and to be made to suffer; and to be taken (I wish he'd pull my daisy); it says here in my (new) notebook, for June 14 “Say not, Love me, Lord,” but “I love you, Lord!” Only lately has this aspect of the way been clear to me in its meaning. You have said this in one form or another to me a number of times; and Claude [Lucien Carr] has told me the same. I was wrong.

Of your poetry. Yeats warns to beware of Hodos Chameliontos. You know what that is? (I was reading his autobiography, borrowed from Lenrow). That is a big dragon, all Chinese, except that it is a chameleon; and one minute you have one Chinese image, the next minute you are bumping along on a Mayan spider; and before you know it it turns into a North African porpentine, and an Indian geek, and a western cat.

“Worry therefore not for green, / And dark, which deceptive signs are, / Of golden milk./Beelzebub is just a lamb.” Or “Twas a husk of doves.”

Hodos Chameliontos is also worrisomely mechanical, and very abstract. Do you know that my lecherous wink is by now become so repetitious and stale and mechanical that I am caught with my pants down? This is because I am not dealing with real things; but abstract relations between values; on the basis of a true inspiration; but the inspiration is departed, the lesson remains and is repeated by rote with many changes of symbol but not of formula. But that is the way my mind works, in its illusory Beulah. Beulaah. Beulaaah. That is the trouble I suspicion in the Myth of the Rainy Night, as far as symbols are concerned; that also was what was wrong with my Denver birds and nightingales and dawns; I got so hung up on a series of words that I went around abstractly composing odes, one after another, until even now I can't tell them apart and what they mean, and had, for instance, to throw all of the birthday ode of Willi Denison
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out the winder, when I was making up my book. That is what is the trouble with the “Divide where the rains and river are decided.” Well, you have worked out a myth for the symbol (rain being Time, events, things; the river and sea all the holy raindrops connected) (No?) and these are good and stable currency to work with; will you have trouble amplifying and extending? Eliot complains that Blake was, alas, a great minor poet, not a major one, since he made up a lot of crazy symbols of his own which nobody understands. Even I can't read the weird beautiful prophetic books because they are full of Hodos. (I'm reading a commentary on them now by Mona Wilson) whereas I get not only understanding but the actual illumination of wisdom from the short “Ah, sunflower.” That is why you are so lucky and wise to be a novelist with an epic of storied events to work on; and why you are inclined (is this not so?) to leave the Myth of the Rainy Night a great big detailed fable-story, and not (as I was trying to suggest,) an allegory with a big worked out symbolism. The Giggling Ling itself is not an aspect of Hodos, for instance, because in addition to its chinoiserie, it also winks out a stale real sound effect which gives it away; it is an actual emotion of reality reconstructed. So the thousands of details of Myth of Rain, will reveal themselves; not through an artificial system of thought. I hearken back to your letter to say, that the dirty ditty in my work comes from the feeling that I have that all I and other people secretly want is . . . also it's happened to me several times that while walking up a rainbow, when I get to the other side I find not a pot of gold but a bedpan, full. But I am not disappointed, because shit is gold. What else would gold be, but that, and rain? or water? So that the key, has been to remind them (people) that the shroudy stranger has a hard on; and that the key to eternal life is through the keyhole; and so I make great big sensual hints; and not dirty jokes, mind you, but serious hidden invocations. And when someone will read it, and see, under the surface of my poem, as under the surface of his mind, a golden pole, and a holey goals, and a silver shower; I hope to accomplish someday an outright sensual communion; and as my love grows purer and less lecherous, when someone peeks under the surface of what I say, they will really be made love to. And not only that, I'll have this long serious conversation with them, just as if the two of us were in the same head. And furthermore, it will only be under the surface for those who are themselves under the surface; but anybody truly akin will recognize it outright, because that's what I'll be talking about all the time right on top down front. And I will be writing about boys and girls in love in dreamland, like Blake, about the pale youths and white virgins rising from their graves in aspiration for “where my sunflower wishes to go;” and, “if her parents weep, / How can Lyca sleep?” and “abstinence sows sand all over / the ruddy limbs and flaming hair.” And if I find out any more about death, as other poets actually have, so they say, then I will have a way of communicating that too. Unfortunately, my present hang up is sexual and so I have recourse to that for key symbolism; but that in time will evaporate into a healthier and less frustrated truthfulness. Also, I learned from a mutual acquaintance, learned “In bodily lowliness, and in the heart's pride / A woman can be proud and stiff (i.e. love is physical) / When on love intent, / but love has pitched his mansion / In the place of excrement.” That's my favorite poem of all, because it is so literal, it has really only one meaning, and that's what Yeats means. I am not just dirty to be cute; it's partly that (when in a poem I say blows, not smokes the flower superfine); but because I am calling the attention of the poem and reader to a state of fact, which is hidden, either from consciousness, or real attention, if conscious. Yes, I too see [Robert] Herrick in his cups writing soft lyrics about his lady's petticoats. Remember walking down the street, reading the Bible, shouting from Jeremiah, “The filth is in her Petticoats?”