Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg Read online

  People were staring at Lucien because, I imagine, he was so beautiful. I asked him why people were always staring at him. He said, “They’ve always done that.” There was no way to explain it—actually, people do always stare at Lucien. And I was full of loving insights that day: I knew all about him that day.

  We walked to another bar in the Bowery and there we ran out of money. But, trying to be like Tom, I wangled a free drink for him from the bartender somehow, and he was delighted. We talked more, and he told me that the difference between me on one side, and he and you on the other, was that I was involved with everyone to the point of always being worried what they thought of me, and you and he were involved in a way which I could never understand. He said you and he have a being that stands apart, examining, that says, “Can this be me?” “Pah!”—Whereas I always said, “Oh this is me and what will the others think!” You see, it was compliment, and as a matter of fact, though, I want no theories made out of this, because it separates us, and as all theories do, separates the world which is not after all dissimilar. Since then I have said “Pah!” too, so Lucien was lovingly wrong.

  Well, finally, we got hold of Tom again, and joined at another bar on Sixth Avenue. On the way Lucien and I picked up Jinny Baker.27 My heart was pounding at the sight of her again, but immediately I saw her I knew something was wrong. I cannot understand Jinny. I deliberately walked in back of her and Lucien, and sure enough she kept saying, “Walk with me, you make me sad back there.” But the moment I walked with her she looked at me with contempt, and once when she used the word “Hysterical,” I grabbed her by the sleeve and said “Who’s hysterical? Eh? Who’s hysterical!” and she covered me with a look of loathing. Why does she hate me? Why did she like me the first time she saw me, why did she make me fall in love with her, and why does she do this now? Where shall I walk—behind her, or in front (in front did not interest her), or at her side, despised? Meanwhile Lucien laughed at her and said very dirty things to her. We went in the bar and waited for Tom. Then we went to the apartment on 12th Street and there, no longer able to understand Jinny, I started to go home, knowing full well that Lucien couldn’t be caught alone with Jinny in Barbara’s place, with Barbara coming home any minute. Lucien said, “But you know I can’t stay here with her.”—and I said, “Well then throw her out,” in a loud voice. But Lucien made me stay. I deliberately borrowed a dime from Jinny to go home on, as a sign of my own loathing for her. Suddenly, as Lucien began to scare her by grapping her lecherously, “she began to like me again,” and like a fool I began believing it again, and danced with her and devoured her with my eyes. Then Tom came in, laughed at her, and he and Lucien went out to drink and to leave us alone to make love. Tom even put on Mel Torme’s “Gone With the Wind” on the phonograph. But the moment they were out of the room Jinny began loathing me again. I cannot understand this. She said, “And please don’t ever call me up again.” I bit her finger real hard, and suddenly she seemed interested in that. You see, I guess she wants to be maltreated, and she wants to maltreat others all the time so that they can maltreat her with logic and conviction. I am not involved in that kind of inversion. Perhaps I understand? “All right, you may as well go home. You can walk home alone, can’t you?” “Oh yes,” she said. At the street corner she said again, “And please don’t call me up again.” I shook her hand and looked at her and said, “I don’t understand you, and you don’t want me.” (But all the time Lucien was whispering in my ear, back at the place, that everything she was doing was for my benefit. Can this be true? How about the street corner? Was Lucien fooling me?) She walked home, logically sad . . . perhaps she always wants to be logically sad, to be sent home alone, so she can brood and gain some satisfaction being sadder than her sisters and Victor Tejeira.28 It’s something like that, but as I said at the beginning, no one knows what they’re doing, but there’s a divineness behind it all, even in Jinny. And I cannot think of any way of saying that to her when I’m with her. You see, there’s life right there, all of it, all of it. That’s it.

  So, alone, I went back to the bar, where Lucien and Tom were having a great time talking. You’d be amazed to know how much they like each other. As I came in Lucien was asking Tom why it was that every time Tom said something, Lucien understood immediately what he meant. He said they had the same minds, with different words. Tom was a little turned away by this perfection of understanding, you see what I mean? We drank and drank, and at one time Lucien was saying something to Tom about me, which I didn’t hear, but which was flattering, that is, good. I don’t mean to say flattering all the time, I realize how petty that is, that is, I don’t realize it, what difference does it make to you whether I realize it or not. You see? So long as it existed and I sort of noticed it from the other world. So we went back to 12th Street, and Barbara was there in bed, and says to me, “What’s the big idea of getting Lucien drunk the moment my back is turned.” I said to her, later, “Be serious, Barbara.” Lucien ended the night dancing with a frying pan, hitting himself with it softly, bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong, sadly at dawn, as I sat watching. We knew, we knew. Not so?

  Jack

  Allen Ginsberg [n.p., New York, New York?] to

  Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]

  after October 19, 1948

  Wed

  Dear Jack:

  Letters or speech as we speak is vague, but only because we are vague. There is no such thing as life’s bitter mystery, and yet you say also that it is a beautiful mystery. It is a mystery to us, that’s all. “None of us understand what we’re doing” but we do beautiful things anyway. The something else that we are doing is always recognized by us one way or other. I want to know what I am doing/I want to recognize this. This can be recognized. That is what psychoanalysis, religion, poetry, all teaches us, that it can by its nature be recognized, sin is not recognizing. Cézanne is a beginning of recognition for me but it is not the real thing, just still an intellectual-sense substitute. All the fascination and beauty of people meeting and echoing comes from our innate instinct which is not yet emerged to consciousness, that we are here, that something specific is there that we are arguing our love about. It is one thing to accept it as such and wander around like in a dreamland struck with uncomprehending wonder of the mystery of the beauty. But if anyone throws back a direct shock of communication—not mysterious, but direct, some people are capable of that—it would be frightening to me and you because it would disrupt the whole dream of ambiguously intended beauty. What if I said stop trying to kid me, stop play acting as if I didn’t know what you were talking about? You don’t say what you mean, particularly in your explanation of what if anything Lou meant by saying that he was sorry that you weren’t a socially acceptable writer.

  “We don’t know what we are saying.” “It appears that only god must know.” What if we really did and were just hiding it. That is what we are doing. What did you really mean when you told me to stop peering into your soul? I was just understanding too much. Understanding sensations and feelings of gibbering idiocy that you had that you didn’t want spoken of, much less enacted. Everything that you say in your letter is true, but still partial because it really tries to deceive with a gentleman’s agreement. I am more afraid of a gentleman’s agreement not to hit below the belt than any other. Everyone knows about the gentleman’s agreement not to get to the real point, and that doubt in the back of the head is the very area of knowledge. Any attempt even to agree on the existence of this doubt and then act as if it didn’t matter when it is the whole point will not bring happiness or art. “If we were god we would always feel love, only with complications.” Yes that is so, and we are already in this state. The thing to do is get rid of such complications, not ignore them or explain them away as part of a meaningless business that had better be left vague, or you know what will happen. “It is just a kind of fear of being understood.” True, absolutely. With love as the basic and only, exhaustive, all meaning and absolute thing that
is being understood. That is why I reach out to touch people, physically. I enact the form perhaps? without content. That is because I believe in action. If you were understood, you say, completely, there would be no more meaning to the understanding, therefore the necessity of sin. “Realize Allen, that if all the world were green, there would be no such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then how could love exist!” This is the root of your dishonesty and in a similar way mine. You try to keep it back. The point is that all thought is inexistence and unreality, the only reality is green, love. Don’t you see that it is just the whole point of life not to be self conscious? That it must be all green? All love? Would the world then seem incomprehensible? That is an error. The world would seem incomprehensible to the rational faculty which keeps trying to keep us from the living in green, which fragments and makes every thing seem ambiguous and mysterious and many colors. The world and we are green. We are inexistent until we make an absolute decision to close the circle of individual thought entirely and begin to exist in god with absolute unqualified and unconscious understanding of green, love and nothing but love, until a car, money, people, work, things are love, motion is love, thought is love, sex is love. Everything is love. That is what the phrase “God is Love” means. There is one law and most men try to live as if their law were different, as if they had an understanding of their own. You don’t realize that your only personality not merely your true personality, which other people see, and even you see, as you, as your only personality, is not that which you set up for yourself and others to see, your individual self enclosed rebellious, egoistic mental system, your childishness. Your personality has nothing to do with you, what you want it to be like in your deception. It is what you are which you don’t admit that I actually see you as. It would be an awful shock for you to realize that. It is also some thing you kept saying to me once. The unbelievable in the back of the head, that is the one thing that people see clearly in each other, not their reasons for not believing it which they have the gentleman’s agreement not to “misunderstand” each other. What the fuck do you actually care whether or not you know you are love in the false way that you seem to think you “know” things now? Why are you afraid to submit to the annihilation of such stupid meaningless unreal knowledge. This is the abyss. Everything is green, love, without the logical fantastic equivocations that we invent so that we won’t actually have to face each other. That is the death truly that Jesus advises, which everyman faces and dies in in different forms but never completely to the point of complete submission. They pass though the phase of possibility of such a death, face it, fear it, put it off, construe it to a meaningless verbal complex, avoid it, are changed and entrenched by the experience. Do you really believe that Lucien totally died, or that he and Bill re-entrenched themselves, but stayed the same? Nobody that we know is dead.

  Can this be me? Every time I see myself as I am I am staring into a cosmic mirror in which I see myself with my thoughts broken into nothing, and my unequivocal physical self weaving and gyrating in the universe in an incomprehensible monkeylike babbling idiocy, a sordid frightening picture. Actually would at that stage be a saint, or an ordinary natural man, but so different are my mental conceptions from reality, that I think I am a monster when I see what could be. I have only faced this mirror for a few moments at a time, actually a few frightened split seconds, at maybe three different times in my life. That is what my equilibrium with L. [Lucien] is. I attempt, or flirt, with that image, a sexual one also as it is one and the same, and because I trust and acknowledge his just mind, and his love, I have only myself to blame if I do not turn before him into the monster. So instead I tell him what I saw in the mirror, and he believes me, at the same time we both realize that we are deceiving each other when we don’t change into what we are. I was frightened as a kid by the transfiguration scene in Jekyll and Hyde. That is because it recalled my true self to me. So miraculous and unbelievable is this true self, is life, that it seems like an image of horror, once we accept that horror we see that it was all a fit, that horror was the birth pains, the pangs of recognition of self deception, and we are in love (in green). Blake and Emily Dickinson and lots describe this specifically.

  “To find the western path,

  Right through the gates of wrath

  I urge my way:

  Sweet morning leads me on.

  With soft repentant moan,

  I see the break of day.”

  This is the moment of death. This is the nectar whereof each one tells. This is why Lucien sadly hits himself on the head with a frying pan at dawn, he has never done it. I have not yet. Yes, for fuck all this, I am crazy. All this is raving babbling. I am I talk and read and write and the circle of destiny narrows and closes around me: die, go mad, what you think now is mad is really love and sane. Die, go “mad.” This is schizoid. I am now monomaniacal in my preoccupation with this moment of will.

  I think what I say is true in one way or another, though you can’t understand it, I think, because I have not made myself clear. Perhaps I could have said all this by saying, of your letter, I understand what you are saying, more or less. I understand because not that I am smart, but that you have actually understood what you were writing. I heard what you were saying. I did not understand fully because you were not clear enough, because you were beginning to understand, but it was not complete you yet. When it becomes more complete, I will understand more. Don’t say that it never becomes complete because what I am saying is that that is just the whole point, even of you, that it can be complete. All green. Abandon everything else.

  Allen

  Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to

  Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]

  ca. December 1948

  Dear Jack:

  I have moved to 1401 York Ave.—3 flights up to the back, left side. (That is at 74th St. east of 1st Ave.) My last weeks in Harlem were very bad but also baffling (everything is bad and baffling now.) Huncke moved in, yakked at me irritably for a week and a half, ate my food, took my last nickel, and walked off with my last suits, a jacket, Russell [Durgin]’s winter clothes (suits, coats, etc.) and twenty or thirty expensive books—(hundreds of dollars worth of books) full of theological notes. Nor have I [a] typewriter any longer as you knew. I will have to pay Russell for all of this, don’t you see. Huncke sent a letter to him a few days later to notify Russell that he was aware of his sins and would someday (perhaps in the month) “try to make it up as soon as he regains his fortunes”—much like the old retired army captain lush in The Idiot.

  I was repaid by God however because a man left me his apartment, $13 a month cold water, 3 rooms fastidiously furnished (one of them is).

  Don’t stay away because you think I don’t want to see you. Don’t think ill of me.

  Lucien and I had a long conversation the other night. I explained my new Faith (you can call it) first in terms of Cezanne (which he bought) but as I went deeper and deeper and approached my own central point he listened responsively. He told me that he thought I was mad. My father thinks I should see a psychiatrist. You think I am getting ugly (same thing?) (Bill understood everything I said but he did not have the experience to be with me, and he wished me luck.) Leaving Bill out, perhaps—assuming I am mad (Ha!) god, how I must have suffered, to go mad. And all the time I was calling to people to save me and no one put out his hand and held it. This is like suicide, only I am alive and looking out of this living death I can see the people weep and feel sorry. Alas, nobody even weeps. It’s all a dream.

  Love,

  Allen

  Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey] to

  Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]

  ca. December 1948

  Dear Jack:

  Have we been in touch with each other? I heard from W. [Walter] Adams through someone else that you asked for my address. It is, a
s I wrote you (did you receive my letter?) 1401 York Ave., third floor back.

  My circle or at least one more cycle is complete. I have returned to Paterson to live—for the while. I look at this as semi eternal, that is, it really marks the closure of some kind of gyre, five years in the running. What really made it complete (that is about all that it did) was that I finally went to bed with Lucien. I will speak to you of it when I see you. The earth did not turn over in its grave, but another sphere did open. We always wonder at these levels and levels, cycle after cycle. You see them as life, and complete and beautiful in themselves. I think sometimes that that is enough, since I understand that beauty, although not with the ripeness and humility that you do. For me however, there is something else, a supreme cycle of which all these are a part—a single real (actual) (literal) (practical) vision of which all new visions are the shadow. The shadows get lighter and lighter with me, my understanding comes nearer and nearer to final knowledge. Veil after veil is removed—by our action in removing it, too. My consciousness interposes itself between my soul and the world, and makes a part of me unreal and perhaps that is the ugliness you spoke of. Someday, I will have destroyed this consciousness, and will be myself. I am most myself lately I think, too. But I always have kept saying this. Once I was convinced that I was wrong. But I have been right—as far as I am concerned. I know that now too well to question. But even such stories as this that I am telling I will cease to tell, as until you will have nothing more to object to, and everything to love. I mean my consciousness won’t get in the way.