Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (5 page)

Jean

 

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Sheepshead Bay, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?]

Monday afternoon
Sept. 4, '45 [
sic
: Monday was September 3, 1945]

 

Dear Jean:

I was well enough to leave my bed today and so I slipped out to my barracks and got my mail which has been waiting. I got your letter, and was so excited by the prospect of seeing Bill [Burroughs] immediately that I ran over to B-1 which is the reception building to look him up. He arrived you said on the 20th. After begging the authorities to tell me how to locate him, I got one petty officer to open the books. I was told he's disenrolled from Sheepshead on the 22'd, two days after he'd arrived. I am just returned to sick bay much bewildered and disenheartened. What has happened? Where is he now—have you heard from him since? Back on Park Ave. I suppose. I very strongly want to see him, but I am restricted here for the next few weeks. But now I feel anticlimactical, hopelessly confused.

I wait with some impatience to hear your description of
La Nuit De Folie
. I hope you'll have regained your psychic balance by the time I hear it; I enjoy hearing your labyrinthine expositions of rescued masculinity—This was unnecessary. But mostly I'd like to hear you describe the degenerate looking limbo character whom I remember quite well. As to the police, [serucisient?], don't let your guilt or repentance upset you, as I fear from your tone that it already has.

Your letter sounds somewhat tired, of a fatigued spirit, whether speaking of your conversations with Bill, or your ennui (the particular cause of your heavy reading), or your unexplained attacks on my “stupidity and vanity,” which distressed me rather than amused or wounded, whatever you were aiming at. What is the matter? At any rate, don't shepherd your artistic problems back into the cave; I'd like to hear of them since I suppose they are almost the most important season of your supernal journey, to borrow your metaphor.

Alas! I am sorry about the Admiral the other Saturday. My absence was unavoidable as I explained in the postcard I sent last night. I am feeling much better now, although for a day I was so sick that I found myself worrying about the future of man's soul, my own in particular. Did you show up? What did you do, what did you think, how did you curse in my absence?

I have been reading while in bed, since it was the only thing for me to do. I finished
The Way of All Flesh
, at last, Thornton Wilder's
Bridge of San Luis Rey
, neither of which I was particularly moved by. Now I have begun, at last,
War and Peace
and am finished with 825 pages of it. I do not think that I like Tolstoi as much as Dostoevsky (whatever the confession means), but I am enjoying myself with
W&P
more than any novel I've read since
The Idiot
. I enclose Trilling's letter. [ . . . ]

Allen.

 

 

Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?] to
Allen Ginsberg [Sheepshead Bay, New York]

September 6, 1945

Thursday night Sept. 6

 

Dear Allen,

Your little letter moved me, I must say . . . particularly the line, “I was so sick that I found myself worrying about the future of man's soul, my own in particular.” There you elicited the true picture of things terrestrial . . . namely, disease and loss and death. I like the way Rilke faces these facts in his un-bourgeois way, and I must say I don't particularly approve of forgetting the facts of life and death in an orgy of intellectual pseudo-synthesis . . . Shelley's “dome of white radiance” has become a sort of rose-coloured dome now, shedding technicolor pinkness on us all. However, I don't think there's much point in telling
you
all this because I know you don't represent the average intellectual softy. Or punk.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become . . . and you must admit that I am in closer touch with public vulgarity than any of us. Although Bill reads the
Daily News
also, I go him one better, alas, and take the trouble to listen to the radio . . .
and
suffer myself onto
P.M.
as well. Archetypal morality in its modern high-pressure Orson Welles O.W.I. [Office of War Information] and Hearst regalia—you see, there are no right and left distinctions, and never were, in spite of what I think the Lancasters and Fritz Sterns
¹²
would say—have become for me a kind of windmill to my Quixote . . . I think of what Joan Adams and Kingsland would say about all this; this makes of me a most ludicrous figure. I'm wrestling with the passé . . . that's what you're probably thinking. Well, let's have no more of this for now . . .

News of Burroughs is what you want . . . I haven't seen him and I don't know where he is. However, I've mailed a card to the University Club in the hopes that it will be forwarded to him, and he may let me know where he is. Gilmore's roommate, Francis Thompson (!) is under the impression that Bill is still in New York . . . Gilmore himself is staying at a cottage on Cape Cod writing a novel. The reason why Bill disenrolled from Sheepshead is because he wanted to go in the MM [merchant marine] as a purser, and very likely they wouldn't see it his way . . . Francis believes that Bill is going to try again. That about sums up all I know about Burroughs for the present, but the moment I'm in receipt of his new address, it shall be sent on to you. There remains but one additional item re Burroughs . . . Joyce Field says he is “leprous.” That I must tell Bill . . .

I was moved by your letter, I repeat. Partly because you'd been and still are sick . . . Partly because of Trilling's letter, which represents something I'd like to happen to me someday, namely, to be liked and admired by someone like him. Although there's something a little wearying about his emphasis on “effect” in poetry, that letter he wrote you is certainly a marvelous example of how an entrenched man of letters can inspire confidence in a young poet. There's something French about it . . . I mean, it smacks of Mallarmé encouraging the young author of
Le Cahier d'Andre Walter
[André Gide]; or of [Paul] Verlaine praising the tempestuous provincial lad in a letter addressed to Charleville; or of Gide bestowing his warm appreciation and admiration on the young and unknown Julian Green. I say all this gauchely in my haste, but honestly I envy you. I think we none of us realize the importance, nay the sweetness, of admiration; it is one of the dying virtues of character. Look for instance at the way Lucien [Carr] is neurotically resented all around Columbia by a lot of bloodless fish who couldn't out-argue him or something, or who couldn't get away with wearing red shirts and striking white masks on the streets, as he did. A recent visit at Columbia, where Carr is still very much in evidence, reveals, I suppose, and to coin a pat and disgusting phrase, the neurotic nature of our times . . . Here are all these jerks snarling out of the corners of their mouths at everything—and particularly at Lucien. There is none of the loving perception of “Look! Look!” . . . no one grabs your arm eagerly to seduce you sweetly with a point . . . there is no Germanic enthusiasm, no thick guttural cries . . . just so much monotonous epigram-making, and as far as that goes, there are no Oscar Wildes at Columbia. Save Wallace Thurston, of course . . .

I was there and I saw Celine Young, Joyce Field, Grover Smith, Joan [Adams] and John [Kingsland], Auerbach the sophomoric bore, Wallace Thurston, [Arthur] Lazarus (who asked about you), and others I can't remember. Celine got drunk and showed me a letter from [Hal] Chase. She says they've broken up, but I don't think they have . . . It would have amused you to see the wonderful understanding Celine and I reached that night: just like brother and sister, it was, all except the wrestling. But vraiment, I think Celine is a remarkable girl . . . She's lost fifteen pounds, she looks like something out of Mann's sanatorium—ineffable, beautiful, self-corroding doomed, a bit mad. She told me, with a melancholy air, that Lucien did not love her and that he would in the future seek his love elsewhere . . . she added to that, that no girl could satisfy Lucien. I was so kind to Celine that night . . . Do you know, Allen, that Celine and I can never again be lovers? It's as though she wanted me more as a brother . . . And I'm inclined to like it, since she's lost all sex-appeal to me in a sort of mystic immolation of desire. But the maddening thing! . . . she's resigned herself to all kinds of fates, including an affair, mind you, with Don Kahn! The situation is straight out of Dostoevsky, my little friend! Look at it this way: she likes Edie [Parker Kerouac] a great deal and reserves the right thereby to ask for my friendship. Secondly, she has always desired my confidence. Everything but romance, as it were. Finally, in view of all that, she decides to have affairs with anyone who wants her . . . Now she says she doesn't want Chase any more; she speaks of that Kahn fellow. I can't get over the irony of all this. I feel more and more like Myshkin
¹³
as time goes on . . . I am in love with a lot of people at this moment, and Celine no less than the others. Being the sensual Breton, it is hard for me to resist sex in relations with women. But here I find myself gladly playing the father-confessor, the sympathetic Raskolnikov to her Sonia,
⁷
while her charms are reserved, as by tacit agreement, for a bunch of nobodies.
O merde à Dieu!
The novelty is there, of course, and I am young enough to wade into new ponds. And anyway I'm going to California in October . . .

I asked Edie to meet me at Columbia this weekend. There's going to be a sort of get-together, which will include Edie, Joan, John, Grover, Celine, Kahn, myself, and I hope, Burroughs—if I can locate him. We will drink a toast to you, I'll see to that. Though Kingsland may giggle and Burroughs smirk and Edie turn up the corner of her mouth and Joan make a crack and Celine smile sweetly and Grover make a pun, I'll suggest a toast to our bed-ridden little
copain
.

Your curiosity regarding
la soiree d'idiocie
is understandable. True, I did feel remorse . . . So much so as to cancel an appointment with Burroughs for the next day, which probably bored him altogether. He has no patience for my kind of neurosis, I know . . . But since then I've been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge. You understand, I'm sure. Remember that the earlier part of my life has always been spent in an atmosphere vigorously and directly opposed to this sort of atmosphere. It automatically repels me, thereby causing a great deal of remorse, and disgust. There is a kind of dreary monotony about these characters, an American sameness about them that never varies and is always dull . . . Like a professional group, almost. The way they fore-gather at bars and try to achieve some sort of vague synthesis between respectability and illicitness . . . That is annoying, but not half so much as their silly gossiping and snickering. If they were but Greeks, things would take on a different tone altogether. I am repelled, then, largely by these social aspects, an overdose of which I got that night. As to the physical aspects, which as you know, disgust me consciously, I cannot be too sure . . . whatever's in my subconscious is there. I am not going to play the fool about that. My whole waking nature tells me that this sort of thing is not in my line. It keeps on telling me. It drums in my nature, telling me, until I begin to suspect its motive. But I shan't worry my pretty little head about it anymore. I think that in the end it will just be a matter of “Drive on!”—you have heard that story about Phil the junky, haven't you? I shall let my neurosis dissolve in the white fire of action, as it were. Strangely, the thing that annoys me the most is the illusion everyone has that I'm torn in two by all this . . . when actually, all I want is clear air in which to breathe, and there is none because everybody's full of hot air. The remorse you detected in my last letter is not all for the reasons you imagined . . . Once I was in bed with a girl, down in Baltimore; I had picked her up in a bar and she promised me she would come across. When we got to bed, she fell asleep and couldn't be awakened . . . I spent the whole night wrestling around with her limp rag of a body, as she snored. It is a horrible experience, that . . . You feel remorse the next day, ashamed of your desire; perhaps you feel like a necrophiliac, maybe there's a fear of necrophilia in all of us, and this business of wrestling around with an unconscious woman is the closest thing there is to necrophilia . . . Well, that's the kind of remorse I felt, for exactly the same reasons. But I knew there would be no clear air vouchsafed me the next day . . . There was no one I could tell the story to who wouldn't in return blow a lot of hot air my way . . . It's almost as though my neurosis were not ingrown, but that it was the result of the air, the atmosphere around me. For there are a lot of horrible things I've done in my life, in the dark away from everything, and not only to me. I am not a Puritan, I don't answer to myself; rather, I'm a son of Jehovah—I advance with trepidation towards the scowling elders, who seem to know about every one of my transgressions, and are going to punish me one way or the other. As a little boy, you know, I started a very serious forest fire in Massachusetts . . . and it's never worried me in the least, because I've had only my own blithe self to answer to for that crime . . . If on the other hand, I'd been caught, I would have suffered terribly. This then, is the kind of remorse I felt . . . But that too is now purged . . . I trust.