Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (48 page)

Write—Mail my manuscripts.
¹⁰⁶

Jack

 

 

Jack Kerouac [Rocky Mount, North Carolina] to
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California]

May 20, 1955

 

Dear Allen:

Well today I wrapped up a 10,000 word short story called “cityCityCITY” and sent it to Cowley asking him to figure someplace to send it and recommend it too if he wants and suddenly in a P.S. I admitted I'd been a fool early 1953 refusing to publish
On the Road
with him . . . Allen do you realize if I had published then, by now I'd have been in the money all this time, would have traveled to Europe, Tangiers and maybe India or even China and Japan and would have probably published
Sax
and also written great new works obtaining from inspirations of travel. Now I suppose Cowley may laugh at me . . . I suppose he figures I'm big underground martyr hero ready to spend life unpublished like Grieg and Tashcaikowksy, crying in the dark . . . Suddenly the past two days I been watchin ants in the garden, their dry villages, their familiar dry travails in the grit, and it seems to me I have reached the point beyond Enlightenment now and can abandon Buddhism now because Buddhism is an arbitrary conception. I mean, in reality, there is no difference between Ignorance and Enlightenment, they are both different forms of the same thing which is that unknowable unpredictable shining suchness as I say . . . a girl's ass is the same as nothing, life is the same as death, practicing discipline is the same as riot, what's the use of torturing your form? The mind-system
cannot
stop, the Lankavatara admits it, the habit, the seed-energy of mind cannot end, therefore there is no way to stop the mind-system as long as you “live” and therefore no way to rid yourself, or obliterate, the “external” world and therefore there is no reason for conceptions of enlightenment and paths and Tathagatas or conceptions of any kind. Your X essence is as it is, the Tathagata is the Attainer-of-X but it is a mental attainment and still the Tathagata dies of dysentery shitting imaginary shit . . . mindshit all of it is mindshit . . . I know that do and don't are the same thing, I know I can stay right here in this lonely cottonfield and do nothing the rest of my life, or suh around and do a million things, it be the same thing . . . As far as I'm concerned now the truth isn't worth a shit. So I think I'll just do anyway, take Krishna's advice . . . now that I know the truth and that it isn't worth a shit what's the difference whether I do or don't? right.

Sure I'd like to come out to the Coast, right now, eat chow mein, drink wine, blast with Neal etc. but have not the money. Think what I'll do is come out there and get a job running a typewriter in Frisco or perhaps baggage room of railroad (anything but railroad braking which I hate because I don't understand how do it).

If so, do I get to stay on your couch till I get paid and start fixin up my own room?

Also, I have an idea it would be good to show
Subterraneans
to Rexroth. It is the first of the “hip” novels and he might go for it, or else sneer at it like Alene [Lee] and Anton [Rosenberg].

That Sterling Lord who calls himself my agent hasn't even written to me, in three weeks or more, I have sent countless panicky requests for word, it started when he said Giroux wanted to see me and my Buddhy manuscript so I write big letter to Giroux and apparently both are bugged by something in it. I asked for a thirty day limit on the reading of the manuscript but does that sound like something to be bugged about? What does it mean when a business agent doesn't reply to you at all as if he was like dead? Can you assay guess? He wasn't pleased by you and
Sax
but what's the matter now? So I wrote and told him if he wasn't innerested in my books to forget about them and send them back EVEN THEN NO ANSWER. As Bill says, a deliberate affront. I am flipping like Bill, like Carl, I must run up to NY within a week and see what's wrong. Please please please the other night I dreamed I was suddenly taken with a convulsion in front of two men in the “synagogue library” and became screaming and flopping like maniac epileptic and they were not surprised nor frightened but merely interestedly awed by calm to see a real maniac and yet as I screamed inside of me there was that essential calm compassionating out to them, I remember, I was screaming and finally my face paralyzed in a contorted position and still I remember my calm eyes sad for them their fear . . . what does this dream mean? does it mean I am a maniac? If I don't get published soon I think I will go into a fit like this and be a lunatic—that's how orldgirl deshepishe ei feel, I feel real awful, these guys in NY are really killing me at last . . . please do something . . . pray for me, something . . . I want to kill myself . . . my family doesn't even want me to get drunk any more . . . I'm really a wretched paper pauepr paoeori like I said. I will write to Carl. Please let me know once and for all if you forwarded my letter to Bill last February. I sent him “cityCityCITY”, no answer.

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 best 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.”