Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (21 page)

Also last Thursday I had lunch with poetry editor of
New Yorker
[Howard Moss]. I sent him poems which he passed on to chiefs but they rejected them on three different occasions. He will look at my book and see if he can find anything they can use. Probably will be able to find something. He also invited me to a party at his house next Thursday (this Thursday) at 11 at nite: young poets who are speaking at a YMHA poetry series, in their honor. He will also introduce me to Dylan Thomas in two weeks. I think if I get around and meet people I may be able to get poems published. Lucien will come to party with Barbara [Hale]; you come too, if you can.

I saw Lu [Lucien Carr] last night. We agreed that your book [
The Town and the City
] had no advertisement and this was a serious situation. Suggest you talk to somebody at Harcourt and if this fails wire Giroux explaining situation and asking what's up. It doesn't seem natural for there to be so little advertising, at such a crucial time, and it may make a tremendous difference.
T&C
could sink into obscurity if they don't make a lot of noise. This may sound like old wives gossip but my original optimistic prognosis, reinforced in my mind by reviews, is being rapidly undermined in my own mind by fears about some commercial slipup unforeseen brought on by Harcourt. Do something. Man the lifeboats. Get Rome on the phone. You have a duty to protect your investments. Don't hesitate. Time is crucial. I am serious. Why is that stinking company advertising nothing in the Sunday papers but Merton? This can ruin everything.

You will he happy to hear that Lucien (himself) said that L.M. Jones's review in the magazine was a lot of “obvious” literary bullshit. Remember, Lucien is a realist. I write this down because I was taken aback by it myself, as I guess you were.

Don't have a mind of my own. Do you?

I see you as a slob, too, in the same way that I see myself as a self-conscious wreck (at the Paterson party), and, as I understand Claude [Lucien Carr], himself, actually sees himself. Trouble with Neal is that he won't admit that he is just a slob to himself. The slob is the truth (not the whole, but a major aspect of the true truth) and it is on this humility that we are true to life. As you spoke of yourself in the Damnation of Pokipsie [Poughkeepsie], 27 years old and alone, fat bellied, that is how I see you. You should look around seriously as you propose to find someone who'll love you for yourself alone, and not your golden hair, and who'll you'll seriously respect in family humility. I am slowly finding that the only future. I look to Carl, in my imagination, as a kind of teacher in this respect. Carl says “The world is a wonderful place,” on the phone this morning: he woke me up to read me a poem called “Thank you, Sir” and quoted me a line of Melville's “The yearning voids recoil, for terrible is earth.” Terrible here meaning awesome; the void-gone-yearning is afraid of the family density of life.

I told Neal to go to the hospital.

I feel the approach of a permanent spring fever. The best spring fever is that which seeks love and warmth, and is without ideas or fever or nerves, and spends sunny Sunday walking in the park and realizing how peaceful life is.

I am glad that Fitzgerald
⁶⁴
likes me, in any phase, and that he digs me as Levinsky. I will write him a note (fifty pages) the first spring day.

Carl said that I should lay down the law to Neal when he tries to get me into a witch dance. He said: “Neal has to come down. Neal has to come down. Neal has to come down.”

Your suggestions about my writing usually set me off inanimately for hours. (mass-observation note) [ . . . ]

Henceforth let's enjoy life. No more suffering, no more woe. I hope this letter finds you in a merry mood.

Your buddy,

Allen of Paterson

 

Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac [Mexico City, Mexico]

Saturday Night, July 8, 1950

 

Dearest Jack:

If you are in any ennui or doldrums, lift up your heart, there IS something new under the sun. I have started into a new season, choosing women as my theme. I love Helen Parker, and she loves me, as far as the feeble efforts to understanding of three days spent with her in Provincetown can discover. Many of my fears and imaginations and dun rags fell from me after the first night I slept with her, when we understood that we wanted each other and began a love affair, with all the trimmings of Eros and memory and nearly impossible transportation problems.

She is very great, every way—at last, a beautiful, intelligent woman who has been around and bears the scars of every type of knowledge and yet struggles with the serpent knowing full well the loneliness of being left with the apple of knowledge and the snake only. We talk and talk, I entertain her in grand manner with my best groomed Hungarian manner, and I play Levinsky-on-thetrollycar, or mad hipster with cosmic vibrations, and then, O wonder, I am like myself, and we talk on seriously and intimately without irony about all sorts of subjects, from the most obscure metaphysical through a gamut to the natural self; then we screw, and I am all man and full of love, and then we smoke and talk some more, and sleep, and get up and eat, etc.

The first days after I lost my cherry—does everybody feel like that? I wandered around in the most benign and courteous stupor of delight at the perfection of nature; I felt the ease and relief of knowledge that all the maddening walls of Heaven were finally down, that all my olden aking corridors were traveled out of, that all my queerness was a camp, unnecessary, morbid, so lacking in completion and sharing of love as to be almost as bad as impotence and celibacy, which it practically was, anyway. And the fantasies I began having about all sorts of girls, for the first time freely and with the knowledge that they were satisfiable.

Ah, Jack, I always said that I would be a great lover some day. I am, I am at last. My lady is so fine that none compare. And how can she resist me? I'm old, I'm full of love, when I'm aroused I'm like a veritable bull of tenderness; I have no pride of heart, I know all about all worlds, I'm poetic, I'm antipoetic, I'm a labor leader, I'm a madman, I'm a man, I'm a man, I've got a cock. And I have no illusions, and like a virgin I have all of them, I'm wise, I'm simple. And she, she's a great old woman with a beautiful face and a perfect fair body that everybody in the neighborhood calls a whore. She's so sharp, and she never makes me shudder. She don't want war, she wants love.

Apparently I have quite respectable precedents—she was engaged to Dos Passos for over a year, he took her and kids to Cuba then, she lunched with Hemingway, knows all kinds of literary people. She was also engaged awhile and helped midwife Thomas Heggen with
Mister Roberts
; he later suicided. (he-he!) But none, she says, compare to me. That's what a woman is for, to make you feel good, and vice-versa.

Then, her children, they are the most knocked out pair of flaming red haired, angelic, wise young boys (age 5 and 10) I ever saw. They need a father, which alas (this is the crux of practical problems) I am sure I cannot be, for financial and other unhappy reasons, such as not wanting to get stuck permanently with the situation. So we talk about this too.

I am in Paterson—I still work, so can't see her much, though I pine. She offered to set me up with her in Cape Cod, she working, I staying home writing and caring for kids, but I can't see it as I still see doctor and want to get in a position of being financially stable somehow (though at the moment I am so beat for money I am a dog). Then to Key West for winter, if I want. Ug, so much joy!

Hal Chase sure picked himself a screwy cold chick.

Tell Joan [Burroughs] that my fair damsel originally reminded me of her, and much of their personal inborn style is alike. You must also tell me what weary, skeptical comments Bill comes on with.

I only wish you were here to talk to. Lucien is so much himself—he patted me on the back mockingly, kept buying me drinks at 4 AM the night I got back in town, asking me sardonic lascivious and practical questions, declaring that he didn't believe a word I said.

By god, I've been canorked with a feather!

Neal rearrived here 2 weeks ago, his car broke down in Texas so he planed back. He and Diana [Hansen] are having trouble between them, partly over practical plans—at this point he's acting slightly gruff and mean, and she weeps; he's also kind of shuddery and nervous. I would be if I were him. He never should have let her have a baby—they were doing ok till she began to try capturing him with authority and ritual, and the baby was or became a kind of trick, which he let pass ambiguously; now its marriage, they were in Newark the other day (with [John Clellon] Holmes and [Alan] Harrington) to get a license. Now he is restive, lost his job, had a call from the Frisco railroad, and is going back west in a few days. He promises to write, he will save money, he will be back when he's laid off; but she, that foolish girl, is beginning to see that she is stuck with the fruit of her too-greedy lust for him; and in the long run I believe she's fucked herself up, and him too, somewhat, by disturbing the balance they had before. She knew what she was getting into, but it was not only serious love, it was a kind of soupy insistence born of jealousy and vanity, that made her assume she would succeed in “fixing” him up.

I never saw him so detailed and rich as in his high description of Mexico, the quartz crystals, and the mambo in that side town.

Helen, I meant to tell you, knows everyone of all sorts—Cannastras, Landesmans, even the Trotskyite and hip types like bearded viper Stanley Gould at San Remo. (Know him?) I saw him the other day in Minetta [Tavern], he was shrunk and thin with junk; and such a messed up youngster too, who doesn't know what he is missing, and is full of hip despair and terrible pride. I was so heart-shaken—not having seen him for half a year, and having met him on the first steps of the road downward, if I may call it such, since he's degenerating with dissipation into a mere substitute for the right, intelligent active cat that he is, that I said to him, haltingly, “You ought to eat more. Guard your health, its the only thing you have.” And he smiled on me, half hinkty, and said, “Sure man, are you carrying anything?” in the most intimately viperish tone I heard since Huncke went away to become a cowboy.

How is your novel coming along? I am going to give Helen my copy of
T&C
[
The Town and the City
] to read. I am poor, I write nothing. I keep fearing for the permanence of this sad nothingness of creation.

I got your letter and read it as an opera on Wotabulshit most terrible of all. Write me, make a plan for me.

Love,

Allen

 

Tell Bill that my fright as he described it is quite accurate, and it took me a long time to get over it; but it also was a fear of having put my money on the wrong horse spiritually and sexually; and I was frightened when I discovered that I had, though the race was not yet over; and my bet had consequences to others besides myself—such a responsibility! yet!

Editors' Note:
Later in 1950, Jack Kerouac married Joan Haverty, whom he had known only for a few weeks. While they were living together, Jack composed a long scroll version of the novel he had been working on for several years, which eventually became
On the Road.
When Joan became pregnant the couple split up. Jan Kerouac was born in February 1952. During this period, Ginsberg continued to live in Paterson and work at temporary jobs while writing poetry. He and Jack communicated in person more often than via the mails. Their correspondence picked up again in 1952, at which point Kerouac was in San Francisco visiting Neal Cassady and William Burroughs was awaiting trial in Mexico, having accidentally shot his common-law wife, Joan, in a tragic incident the previous September.

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to
Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady [San Francisco, California]

ca
. February 1952

 

Dear Jack: and Neal:

O I'm so full of delirium today! Your letter arrived, and last night I opened a strange letter from the Hotel Weston in New York, I couldn't figger out who it was from. But I wrote W.C. Williams a crazy jazz letter (mentioning you) last week and sending him weird poems. And his letter (I repeat it entire for the sweetness of it) sed:

 

“Dear Allen:

Wonderful! really you shall be the
center
of my new poem—of which I shall tell you: the extension of
Paterson
. (I shall be proud to bring you the
Paterson IV
.)

For it I shall use your “Metaphysics” as the head (as some shit uses a quotation from some helpless Greek in Greek—to precede his poem)

How many of such poems as these do you own? You
must
have a book. I shall see that you get it. Don't throw anything away. These are
it
.

I am in N.Y.C. for a winter vacation. Home Sunday. The next week-end we'll do something. I'll get in touch with your father.

yours,

devotedly,

Bill”

 

I opened it and said aloud “God!” The poems he is referring to (he is also referring to an earlier request to me to take him down to River Street Paterson for an addition to his poem, after my father wrote him inviting him here, and he replied yes and sent me a message that he wanted to dig my Shrouded Street area) a bunch of short crappy scraps I picked out of my journals and fixed up like poems, the like of which I could write ten a day to order: like:
and
and [seven other poems . . . ]