Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Neal Cassady [San Francisco, CA] ca. April 21, 1949

Dear Neal:

Are you too occupied to write, or don’t you want to for some reason concerning your relationship with us in N.Y.? No reason occurs to me that seems important, despite the usual fantasies of hassle.

The golden day has arrived for Jack [Kerouac] and he has sold his book [The Town and the City]. He has a % promise, on sales, 85% on movie rights (which I believe will materialize as a matter of course after considering the nature of his work; but this has been my opinion for a long time; it now seems to be more generally accepted, and so may be true) and most important for the actual money, $1,000.00 (a thousand) cash advance, which has been in his possession for several weeks. He is not mad at you; as matter of fact 5 out of the 15 sandwiches he denied you in Frisco went bad before he could eat them.

Bill Burroughs has been arrested and faces a jail term in Louisiana for possession of narcotics and guns, etc. There is now no telling what will happen but he may get out of it without jail. Joan [Burroughs] wrote, and he wrote the next day having got out on bail quickly. If he is to be jailed I expect to invite Joan [to] NY to stay with me with children at my apartment. If he gets out, he will have to leave Texas and Louisiana as it is hot there for him; perhaps to Chicago, or Yucatan; doubtful of N.Y. as his family objects to this city, and much will depend on them financially, I think.

Claude [Lucien Carr] is writing stories and being psychoanalyzed. These are radical developments which I, at least, have hoped for and I believe it is the beginning of his regeneration and the assumption of an ideal power and humanity for him. He broke with Barbara this month. As long as I have thought of us as artists, it has been Claude who I thought of as central to any active inter-inspiring school or community of creation, and him to whom I have looked for the strength to assume responsibility for the truest aesthetic knowledge and generosity; it appears, somehow, that the unseen magnet has begun to draw him at last. And so a kind of potential millennium, that I dreamed of years ago with juvenile and romantic prophetic power, is being actualized in its truest forms, and in the only necessary and inevitable way. I talked with him all last night, heard him outline the method, plot, and technique (to give his ideas categories) and it sounded, what he had to say, essential, accurate, and so unexpected as to be inspired to my mind; and yet proceeding logically from his whole past position; but surpassing it. Anyway, another myth come true. His concern is with action and facts and things happening; but he seems (I say but because though that is the concern of all writers, ostentatiously, except crackbrained alchemists like myself) he seems successfully concerned with facts and their harmony and relationships, and all suggestion of what I would look for as the metaphysical or divine seem to rise from his stories as they do from life, and more so, because of the objectivity and sympathy and seemingly self enclosed structure of his tales; so that there is nothing extraneous or purposeless in his work; he says everything he says because he intends to. This self evident principle I discovered for my own poetry (everything must have a point and not be rhetoric) last summer consciously; but I have not been able to perfect many poems to clear realization because of my own abstract and vaporous tendencies; but I see it successfully applied in Claude potentially more than Jack. When Claude’s imagination becomes freed of fear he will be a great man. I dwell so much on this because now Claude is again in the fold, the great RAM of the fold much improved from before; once again we are involved in the same work of truth and art all together. Maybe I am making too much of a good thing, however so let it pass.

I am again in a doldrums, a weak link in a chain, only surpassed in weakness by yourself perhaps. Herbert has been with me draining my money and vitality for months; now Vicki and a man named Little Jack have joined us, and are operating out various schemes successfully. Money is beginning to come in; I am to sublet my apartment to join Joan and Bill [Burroughs]: they will pay my way (Little Jack, etc.) in return for apartment for summer and now. But Bill’s arrest casts a shade on that and I do not know what I will do. I would like to leave the city for the summer (June, July, August) if possible to stay with Joan and Bill. I am not writing much or well, but I have always been dissatisfied with what and how I have written; now however my artistic impotence now seems more real and radical and I will have to act someday, not only writing more, but on large scale, commercially usable (poetic dramas for television as I dream) etc. However my theoretical and visionary preoccupations – fixation, based on experience which was gifted, as it seemed, from a higher intelligence of conscious Being of the universe, or hallucination, as the doctor dismissed it when I went to arrange for therapy beginning September, has left me confused and impotent in action and thought and a prey to all suggestions, winds of abstract thought, and lassitude’s and sense of unworthiness and inferiority that rise continually before my now dulling eyes, and a prey to all suspicions, my own and others, that come forth. The household set up which I both hate and desire, that I have, is an example of my uncertainty of path and dividedness. It seems that the road to heaven or back to sanity require me to deal in realities of time and circumstance which I have never done, and to learn new things, which I’m unused to. But I seem to have, like Joan, passed some point in my brain which I cannot go back from, and for the moment forward either except by some violent effort I have been incapable of since I can remember. But perhaps therapy will help me. Anyway, I am making preparations to teach in Cooper Union College this fall, and so have some financial security more than now at A.P. Then I will be by myself and try to think unless something unexpected happens from the outside to change me or my relations with others. Next year this all amounts to saying, I will try again; now I am caught up in weariness and defeat and sterility and circumstances which have no end or meaning. Perhaps by leaving town I will activate and escape this inertia. Perhaps if you thought well of it I will come to California. At the moment however, I am not in any active suffering, and my mind is active and comparatively clear. It is long inaction and too much introspection and lack of practical ambition that weighs me down. However my pad is hot, and I expect a visit from the narcotics people since they seized several of my letters to Bill in the course of his fall. If I were able to keep clean that would be OK, but with Vicki and others pursuing their busy rounds there is always something for the law to object to. I can’t seem to put my foot down, or make up my mind to, mostly because that is why they are using my pad in the first place, to operate out of, and my end is to get enough to travel off their work. Perhaps I shall find that I have been self destructively greedy on this score. But when I see the treasures rolling in I find it a powerful argument against any cautionary impulses, of mine. And maybe nothing will happen. That about summarizes what goes on on York Ave. General intimidation. Herbert was beat, and now just begins to prosper, so I can’t well put a stop to it all. Or not easily anyway. I guess this sounds cowardly; or maybe it’s only a balloon I blow. Claude and Jack don’t seem to approve, and that is why I am concerned at all. Or what brings the concern to my mind, anyway.

What are you doing? When will your heart weary of its own indignity and despotism and lack of creation? Why are you not in N.Y.? Can you do anything away from us? Can you feel anybody as you can feel us, even though in N.Y. you did your worst to surround yourself with a sensate fog of blind activity? Or are you learning something new wherever you are now? If you wonder the motive for these questions don’t undercut it with suspicion of sexual motives of mine; I have none now and was not dominated by them when you were last in N.Y. [. . .]

Love,
Allen