Came back to Mérida today Met bunch of Mexico City painters on junket to study provinces and talked French and will go to a big gran baille (dance) tonite (Sat. nite)—and tomorrow look up Professor Stromswich for info on Mayapan ruins—also must pick up letter from Bill from Rome at Consulate and telegram perhaps with money from home—down to $25 dollars, enuf to get to Mexico City but not much more and want to see more Mexico south so sent for some more $ from Gene. My Spanish is got to point where I can find out what I want easily but I keep making mistakes that have cost me money from time to time—enough to wish I knew—like I bought the wrong kind of hammock and so lost out 9 pesos the other day.
Also in Merida a “homeopathic druggist” i.e. I don’t know, different from pharmaceutical druggists—name of George Ubo been everywhere in U.S. and Yucatan and told me how to get everywhere on big 10 foot map he has. So far everywhere I have run across someone or other who showed me the town in English or French or English-Spanish mixture but have not met anyone great—except one nite in the rich hotel in Merida last week, wandered into bar for 1 peso rich-man’s tequila and ran into a drunk brilliant elderly Spaniard who talked to me in French in great world weary monologue full of filth and Paris and N.Y and Mexico City and who was later led off by his bodyguard to be sick in the urinal—later found out he was the richest man in the area Yucatan Peninsula—famous character who married a whore 20 years ago and owns everything everywhere and gets drunk every nite with venerable looking Jaime de Angulo white bearded spic internationalists at the hotel—who were there that night winking and calming him down—sort of an old evil Claude he was, full of misery and rich and drunken disregard of life.
Mosquitoes down here awful—all beds come with M-nets and I have bought one for my hammock.
Jack, incidentally—they won’t let you past customs in Mérida without health card and all the Indians have vaccination marks they wear “proudly”—it’s really a 50-50 necessity Have had dysentery and took pills and it went away so no suffer. No such thing as a natural man untouched by medicine around here—it’s not for touristas, tho it’s a tourista routine—it is for everyone.
If I had more money, I found a way to get thru Quintana Roo involving busses and narrow gauge mule driven R.R. and an afternoon walk 13 kilometers on rocky mule path thru jungle—or else a 40 peso boat around peninsula —but cannot go cause too costly for my purse. But will be fine trip for someone someday Many people all over ready to help the traveler—it’s like a frontier—with engineers building a road thru that never gets done.
The man here, head of archeology, name given me by Museum Natural History in N.Y.—turned out valuable—gave me pass to stay on archeologist’s camps, free, everywhere there’s a ruin I go. Great way to travel and see ruins. Write me note to Mexico City Embassy
Love,
Allen
[Ginsberg spent several months in Chiapas, Mexico, where he had adventures and wrote long letters during the lazy afternoons. In the summer of 1954, he arrived on the Cassadys’ doorstep. With the same enthusiasm he had shown Mexico, he recorded his first impressions of San Francisco and the nascent literary scene he discovered there.]
Allen Ginsberg [San Jose, CA] to Louis Ginsberg, Edith Ginsberg and Eugene Brooks [Paterson, NJ] July 10, 1954
Dear Louis, Edith and Gene and Kinder [Edith’s two children: Harold and Sheila]:
I applied at the railroad for brakeman’s job. A good job if it works out and I can do it, which would be difficult but valuable experience and good pay (3-5 hundred month) but no hiring going on at present. Will reapply in a few weeks the situation I am told fluctuates rapidly and I have friends on RR who recommend me (who got Jack similar job). Meanwhile no worry and I can wait beyond summer if necessary without strain.
I looked up Rexroth’s connections here, he’s away on vacation but sent me name of a Prof. [Ruth] Witt-Diamant at San Fran State College who runs a poetry institute or club. Moderators are Kenneth Patchen (of all the creeps) (I have been spared meeting him so far but will see him for the sake of my universal conscience), Norman Macleod who is white-haired and has a speech defect and is sucking around the course to see if he can get a job in the school there, apparently he’s taught a lot but in S.E is presently unemployed, and Robert Duncan, a young Pound student, about 30 and smart but sort of a pathetic type, tries to browbeat these poor nowhere would-be student poets at round table workshop type meetings, admission 50¢ and not worth a nickel. Macleod most simpatico of the trio. I gave him my book unintroduced and he wrote me a letter next day saying he liked it and would pass it on and suggesting a nasty little local magazine named Inferno to send some to. But he’s a nice guy Rexroth apparently the only real brain around here except for [Yvor] Winters at Stanford, I haven’t met him but will soon. I have a meet[ing] to discuss metrics with Duncan some afternoon when I get to town.
I’ve also seen a lot of Chinatown: the food is more excellent varied tasty and original than NYC Chinatown, it’s easier to get, and it’s about half as cheap as NYC. They have basic dishes I never heard of, a brand of Won Ton soup new to me and better than original NY style, 40 cent fried rice and tea, etc. I also hit all the North Beach bars—their Village—and found more life even than in NYC, more bars even anyway, and the same people as NY or their spiritual cousins; a very depressing sight in some respects and I’m glad I’m in San Jose where I can be protected from the temptation to run around to wild surrealist movies, art shows, jazz bands, hipster’s parties, cellar lounges filled with hi fidelity Bach, etc. All in all a very active cultured city the rival of NY for general relaxation and progressive artlife. Probably a very fine place to live if you like cities. When I get money I’ll move there for a while, at least a few months to absorb it all. Spectacular views of the bay bridges, Alcatraz, whiteroofed city on hills, clean, expansive horizon, ships in the toy harbor (really so huge). Communist murals in the tower (Coit) where sightseers go to observe, but they’ve decided after much public bitching, to let them stay and they’re funny and charming as they are. Also keeping the cable cars, a big issue here.
I have unnecessary piles of correspondence, with Kerouac at the moment a monumental exchange of descriptions of SF-Mexico trip and him sending news of NY Plus long dissertations on Buddhism which he’s been reading in for a year and is all hopped on. In between I work daily on poems but still not really shoveling at the mountain of notes yet.
Eugene sounds positively angelic. Louis sounds happy too. I had a haunting sense that most of my Mexico letters were gibberish since there’s no map around, as Edith tipped me off. The parakeet is really a new and shocking development. I never dreamed ..... But why not go whole hog with a monkey and really get some animal inspiration. Incidentally I traveled with a monkey for several days on the way out and if you think parakeet crap comes anywhere near the nuisance value of a monkey’s bowel movements... I should say, you could have done worse. I hope Louis is behaving himself with the animal. I’ve always suspected him of having a strange unnatural savage fascination with the little dears. It was one of his poetic eccentricities, one of the few he allows himself. Let me warn you about him. If you find the bird dead like some mystical swallow under a rose bush one summer morn. I will write Harold. Regards to all, Sheila. Tell her (again) to dig Gerry Mulligan’s music. He must be playing around the Apple (as NYC is referred to from afar).
Nothing new special to report. I visited the Rosicrucian meeting here and met some old lady spinster Rosicrucians. They keep seeing imaginary auras and talking about their lousy karmas. (You pay in one life for what you do in the last few, you keep getting reborn) and they keep having dreams about when they were in Egypt and Atlantis. This is the occidental Rosicrucian center. I sure would have liked to pick up on them in the Middle Ages but now they’re a bunch of mystical bobby soxers.
Everybody appears to be either off their rockers or getting religion. Cassady has some mediumistic cult [Edgar Cayce] that has changed him so that he kneels and prays with his children; the doctrine is screwy and absurd, almost on a Readers’ Digest level, but the seriousness of the search for uplift is real enough and respectable; Kerouac seems all hung up on a Buddha doctrine of life as a dream; even Burroughs in far off Tangier appears to have undergone a humanistic conversion and Jack sent me a letter from him declaring, “I say we are here in human form to learn by the human hieroglyphs of love and suffering. It is a duty to take the risk of love. I know that ultimately the forces of death will destroy themselves.” Such generalizations belong in a Nobel Prize speech. As for me sanctity is a worn out suit. I’ve been reading everything from theosophy to W C. Fields’ biography and Eliot criticism. I hear WCW [William Carlos Williams] has a new book out. Jack’s recommending me some Buddha books so I’ll eventually read those too. Nothing like a wide range of information.
Well enough of this prattle. Forgive me if I don’t write too often but I’ll keep well in touch, it’s just that when I get started like this I wind up spending hours instead of writing book.
Love,
Allen
Allen Ginsberg [San Jose, CA] to Eugene Brooks [New York, NY] August 14, 1954
Dear Gene:
Received yours of the 12th rapidly today fast service. Thank you for the check, really thoughtful. My expenses are not very much and are taken care of. I’ll hold on to the check in case I need it but I don’t think I’ll cash it, at least in the immediate future. If I do I’ll let you know. I am still negotiating with the railroad for the job, it’s not settled yet one way or the other. I was turned down by the doctor in a physical for what I thought were phony reasons. Since writing to you (or Louis) last on the subject I appealed his decision to the Southern Pacific hospital in S.F. to his superior and found that I was right; they passed me. The score as far as the doctor remains a bureaucratic mystery too involved and tendentious to go into here (he’s just an old fart slightly anti-Semitic is the nearest I can get to it). At any rate having been ok’d by the hospital has set off some small bureaucratic war in one of the smaller offices of the RR Co. and I am waiting the results. I expect to know this week. Maybe favorably, but you never can tell. At any rate since I want the job I’ve been pushing it with more vigor than my usual wont. (As to the 4F deal, first doctor said no ex 4F’s employed on orders from his superiors. His superiors told me Merchant Marine made up for that and passed me.)
Hope you enjoy Cape Cod. Helen Parker introduced me to the place; the late Wm. Cannastra and a whole pile of Remo types hung around there and still do, those that survive. There should be lots of chicks around. San Francisco has a huge highly organized bohemia, in fact it’s a big institution sympathetically treated in the SF Chronicle, a good paper. I spend a day or so a week there looking up people. I met Kenneth Rexroth who is the big cheese poet here except for Jef fers and spent an evening talking with him. He used to know or knew of Louis. A real learned man, translates Chink, Jap, Greek, Latin, French and is an editor at New Directions. Also an anarchist self-professed with a whole line of dreary self pitying ARTIST hangups. I’m no one to talk but he makes a profession out of it which is really embarrassing to listen to. However he knows a lot about literature when his taste is not corrupted by this kind of hangup.
That’s a good idea about investing small sums in plays. I never heard of Yvelvington (YVELVINGTON?) and somehow the name smells of bankruptcy However if by the investment of a small sum you could get to dig the scene (is it Sheridan Square Circle?) [Circle in the Square was a theater on Sheridan Square] (and maybe some of the dolls) even if as seems likely you lose the money you might be buying yourself some useful experience in the field. Anyway that’s a good way to circulate some of the banked money and probably good for some kicks, be worthwhile. I don’t know personally of any small group or author in whom I think investment would be remunerative, except by some such chance as might come thru with Quintero, though I should think with the success they had they had enough backing by now, unless he’s passing off on you a long shot he don’t want to back. But these are thoughts on no basis of personal knowledge.
Speaking of investment, have you thought of putting some money in an investment trust (like Investment Trust of Boston?). They take your money you buy stock in them, that is, and they take their total assets and invest it in stocks, spreading out the investment all over the map to give it a safe base. You get monthly interest (about 45 dollars on 5 thousand) and a yearly dividend. Interest and dividend you can spend or reinvest. You can sell it anytime, and you can borrow in it cheap anytime. On the basis of the last 20 years a 10,000 investment becomes worth 80 thousand. Presuming the economy is going to be stable and not take a stock nose-dive, it’s one of the safest and most remunerative forms of investment. Bankers and insurance companies say they’re a good thing, safe that is. They also provide you with perpetual economic advice on major moves, like buying houses, cars, etc. with personal service, that is they assign you an advisor. Neal has about 6000 invested in above mentioned fund and seems to be getting his money’s worth. I myself have ‘grave’ doubts that the U.S. will stay stable and economically upswinging. But I think barring a bomb you could probably tell when things were going to get really bad and withdraw. At any rate you should do something with your money to make it work for you instead of letting it sit. For instance in Santa Clara Valley here the population and building is going fast and people are building on all the old peach etc. grove land. Well you buy yourself a few acres of that and resell in a year or so and make money The areas of development and the certainties of it are much clearer to the eye here than in more confused and developed East. While looking around for a house to buy here we ran into such possibilities. However undoubtedly the international situation is such that you’re wise enough to keep your money in your pocket or bank.
As for international situation it seems to me that since Indo China the whole deal ought to be much clearer. Eisenhower’s recent statement modifying and limiting U.S. policy to cooperation seems to have put the final nail in the coffin. Just think a few years ago Life was talking about the American Century It’s obviously the Asiatic century if it’s anybody’s. Spengler etc. The U.S. with all its phony stupid realpolitik has just about put itself and me behind the 8-ball and at this point I don’t see any way out. We’re too stupid, people here seem to think they can get away with the usual shit to the end of time. Seven years ago we still had time for a total reversal of egotistical direction in favor of an all out Point 4 UNRA etc. super policy of cooperation and relief and rehabilitation involving us with as much energy in a positive program of world development as we have spent in a negative series of armed retreats from an untenable imperialistic selfish position. The policy has at this point definitely failed, as anybody then could see, we never had a Chinaman’s chance to limit or ignore India, China, Russia, socialism, etc. All we’ve done is fucked everything up by forcing them to fight us and become as monstrous as we are. Confucius said: “Rule an empire as you would cook a small fish.” The only hope for peaceful survival we ever had was obvious years ago and simple as cooking a fish. However the U.S. is lost in a mad dream of plastic lampshades. There’s an obvious relation between the evils of competitive usury capitalism and the whole senseless self righteous psychology that goes with it and the present fact of our being humbled and beat down by the rest of the world who are plain sick of us. Everybody from Europe to India has been saying that for years and we still haven’t caught on. And as far as I can see it when we go down any possibility of a really constructive cooperative future goes, everybody everywhere will wind up in bureaucratic armed misery I’m writing a poem on the subject. I never saw the possibility of political poetry before but the international political situation seems to me to have at last palpably revealed its final necessary relation to moral or spiritual justice. Finally for the fiftieth time, I declare, the so called higher ups, the military authorities and industrial experts and government experts, etc. etc. who have been shrouding their plain stupidity all along in the Time-type myth of realpolitik—trying to tell everybody that they know more than anybody else and that their decisions are mathematically predicated on the given data of power and policy—trying to browbeat everybody else who has any plain common sense at all into handing over to them the mystic power to make mistakes—well I don’t know where this sentence goes but my point is that the men who are running the government are playing it strictly by ear whatever they think and they have the worst ears. This government would be better run by a bunch of irresponsible tea heads from the San Remo. Ezra Pound says a politician who is not an accomplished musician and doesn’t understand Greek prosody is unfit for office. At least Mao Tse-tung spent 10 years in a cave studying Confucius, and writing odes.
I haven’t seen Caesar, Waterfront or the hot-rod motorcycle picture with Brando, yet. They’re all supposed to be good.
Give my regards to Levy if you see him, and Klein if you write him. How is the minister’s daughter’s [Connie, Eugene’s future wife] mother and brother? From what I see of wives and husbands you might be making a good bargain if you do marry her. At least she’ll appreciate it and take good care of you. If you can’t find a great love to marry I think, your wife should be humble. She’s all right. You thinking of marrying her? I would hate to say one thing or another but since she does seem to like you sincerely for yourself and have a great many potential wifely virtues, that is to say she knows what she’s doing and getting into and seems to like it—why then if you feel like getting hitched you might as well.
I am reading a lot: Troilus and Cressida (disillusioned bitter Celine-ish Shakespeare), Pound Eliot Winters Leavis criticism, Chinese and Latin poetry, books and articles on prosody You would like Catullus. I read a collection of translations edited by an Aiken, and am reading him in Latin now with aid of a pony Selections in anthologies won’t give you the idea. Get a book of translations from all times, from library The Aiken book is good, includes translations by Ben Jonson, Byron, Landor, Campion, etc. I am doing some real study on metrics and maybe will come up with something. It’s already improved the music of my free verse. Trouble is a real study involves knowledge of music, Provencal, Greek, etc. It all relates directly to history or basic theory of metrical practice and notation. I don’t know how far I can go with the crude education I have. I mainly miss music. There is a difference between the kind of fine classical education you can get in private school and the vague generalities of public high schools. Write sometime. I’ll let you know when anything happens.
Love,
Allen
PS. I bought the new Céline—it’s opening is great but I haven’t finished it yet. It seems so disordered in the writing it’s hard to read like the more hallucinated parts of Death on the Installment Plan—but still worth the trouble and very funny The translation is not by the same person and is more awkward—that’s part of the trouble I think. Look at it and tell me what you think.
[While staying with the Cassady family in SanJose, Carolyn discovered Ginsberg in bed with Neal. The next day she drove Allen to San Francisco, gave him twenty dollars, and left him out in North Beach at the corner of Broadway and Columbus.]
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Jack Kerouac [n.p.] September 5, 1954
Cher Jean-Louis Le Brie:
Thank you for your letters, all so kind, all so sweet to get, such a pleasure that tho it’s a waste of time etc. I get more kicks from reading them than almost anything else,—but don’t write if not so set up, natch. Hard to write with burn-blister on thumb (of pen hand) and no typewriter. Well: what has happened out here, afterward will express my joy at the [Malcolm] Cowley news, so right for the occasion. Sooner or later as I opined (in a prophetic tone) in first or other letter it was bound to break sooner or later. Yours is assured, I wish mine were equally so. Show Cowley my poetry if you can without embarrassment when there is a ripe time, but not if it involves a hassle. But more of this later.
I have a lot to relate but hard to write with bad hand—Carolyn caught me and Neal—screamed,—she is I think a charnel—yelled,—reversed her original hypocrisy—was it?—or I shouldn’t maybe judge—but it was not comic, the intensity of insult and horror and even I think spite, indignation, etc. (She burst into my room one 4 AM at the house) (though you see I was hiding nothing—told her in fact—it was O.K.’d—but all the details are not for here can’t write fast enough) but anyway a horrible scene—ordered me gone—Neal went blank, ran out to work—I sat and faced her. She talked and I thought her face waxed green with evil. “You’ve always been in my way ever since Denver —your letters have always been an insult—you’re trying to come between us” and more, horrible—such force, Celinish, I went cold with horror—felt steeped in evil. They hate each other, charnels to each other she and Neal. But I can’t picture it to you as I really see it, no Levinsky sacerdotalism involved. I was glad to get away So took 20 dollars and went up to Frisco to the above address—(I had said nothing back to her - went blank with a kind of hopeless feeling she was mad—though tried to hold with some kind of in-sad sight to it all—I didn’t come to screw her up) and here moved into Sublette’s hotel (he moved to the Marconi up a few blocks Broadway can see Vesuvius from his window) and pounded pavements madly. Got a job in market research, $55 a week, 9-5 next month—on Montgomery financial street—found a girl the first night—a great new girl who digs me, I dig—2.2., young, hip (ex-singer big buddy of Brubeck, knows all the colored cats, ex-hipster girl) pretty in a real chic classy way straight—she works in high teacup emporium store writing advertising—digs me—she has a wild mind, finer than any girl I met—really —a real treasure—and such a lovely face—so fine a pretty face—young life in her—and real sharp agenbite of inwit thoughts like Lucien—Thos. Hardy So have been seeing her for a week we talk and neck and will make it sure—but she has a kid (married at 18, kid 4 years old) used to sing in San Jose roadhouses and knows Mrs. Green [marijuana], etc. What a doll. And she’s not a flip thank god. Not a stupid square in any way but not a flip. Sheila Williams. She tried to get me a crazy job at store the first nite I knew her—instant digging each other —how wild and great. 0 well, to see how this proceeds—nothing ugly can happen anyway thank god, she’s too fine -she dug Sublette, etc. But we wander around alone and sit and drink coffee at her apartment and talk—and she digs the really good lines of my poetry, not just generally digs, but digs the specific tricks—well enough.
So to continue otherwise: I live in the Marconi hotel—run by dykes—first night they say to me—“here’s yr. key. You want to have anybody in your room go ahead and have a ball we’re drunk all night ourselves”—and they are. Middle size room $6.00 carpet soft on floor privacy Sublette upstairs and—horrors ! Last Friday night Sheila takes me to big party of nowhere engineers on Telegraph Hill. I come home 4:30 AM meet Sublette, and Cosmo (a weird egotistic small poet smart aleck) go and get coffee, the cops look at us, search us, find white powder on Cosmo. To jail, all night, my first week here, as a vagrant (tho I have $18.00 and a job for Monday to come and a room and party suit on) in tank, me and Sublette horrified (I had a pipe in my room but they didn’t look) but actually great kicks—set free the next day Cosmo doesn’t get out for 4 days—the powder was foot powder not junk all along—he kept telling them but didn’t believe and had it analyzed and finally let him go. So Bill better be careful.
I went saw Pippin, Gene Pippin, at Berkeley—he real smart you know on archaic styles and respects invention too (tho he’s limited like Ansen, etc.) but served me big meal, glad to see me, we talk all eve till i AM about Cannastra and N.Y and he reads me Fulke-Greville etc. and is not tied up and private snit like he used to be—has graying hairs even (31 yrs.)—so a happy “occasion.”
Yes, of course I am a Taoist, I know about that and I dig it in relation to yoga —guilt—discipline—absolutes like you do for the same reason, the big fact is there in Taoism and it’s much more relaxed -as I dig the first poem in The Way of Life—“Whichever way you slice it etc.” Zen Buddhism is also a very late sharp humorous version—though it has sinister disciplinary undertones I understand. I will though definitely do what I have never done, following your example, and read the books you named, I have a library card here now (and am reading Latin poets too. I like Catullus) (Big passionate sharp feelingful love poems to Dusty [Dostoyevsky] and also to his boy, juventius).
I am writing among other things a series of Roman—saintly—“realistic” —platonic etc. some pornographic poems from Neal pages too. I have a lot of fine things in my journal—50 good poems maybe—still trying to get them typed up and add more and measure them out in lines and it will be O.K. But my writing isn’t gone enuf yet.
I at last enclose Siesta in Xbalba. It won’t be finished (I won’t quit trying to add) for a while but this is the best I can do with it after 4 months—5 months. The handwritten part still doesn’t get a vision of Europe like I hope for but just mentions it and signs off. Show this to Lucien maybe and Cowley maybe? if you dig it—maybe it’s too revised and formal now.
Yes, Rexroth was only an idea just in case nothing else was happening, Cowley much better. By the way the Ansen type poet round here name of Robert Duncan, friend of Pound, runs a crappy tho sincere Pound type poetry circle here part of S.F. College came to my room and saw a typed copy of your “Essentials” of Prose (remember, you wrote it down on E. 7th St.) and dug it (strangely particularly the part of no revision and the general conception of spontaneity) and asked to borrow it to make a copy and wanted yr. address and wanted to know who you were etc. Well he’s a funny guy queer, his poetry is all crazy and surrealist and he’s a friend of Lamantia and his poetry also is no good because too aesthetically hung up all about his sensibility faced with the precise tone of his piddle—Light, etc.—that’s the subject matter—but it’s all right he’s nice a curious person, talks too much in front of his young Corso students.
Neal—he played chess with Dick Woods and was blind, etc. except in a weird way very nice to me, but he is mad—the thing is Jack he really is suffering some incipient insanity—the charnel Carolyn, the frantic sex—now it is terrible pathetic mad rushing around and can’t even make it—getting caught masturbating by his conductor—fucking 70 yr. old spiritualist woman in SJ.—the crackpot Cayce which he holds on to like some doctrine in an asylum—half serious obsession—I see him driving now frantic with empty hatreds of other drivers on Bloody Bayshore—he hates Carolyn I think—but nowhere else to go—no way out of the 3 children R.R. After I left they both went and took (o comedy horror) the Rorschach Ink Blot Test (which is maybe more or less accurate in determining degree of clinical insanity if you believe in the word, which I don’t for me and you, but sort of do now for Neal) and he told me, jumbled, four conclusions: i.) sexually sadistic 2). pre-psychotic 3). “delusive thought system” 4). intense anxiety prone. Well as to number 3 that means if anything he has some kind of mad “Cayce—sex—driving—T”—system which is operating independently sort of convulsively compulsively running him around a kind of rat race. He don’t write no more “I was writing about sex and you dig it’s sinful, I know etc.” he says. And Carolyn agrees “What good is that sort of thing, you call that art? It’s just dirt.” I tell you that household is—and so much gold in trash now, the chess, maniacal. He won’t talk to me, except in a sort of dissociated way Comes to my room in Frisco gets in bed and plays with self. You know how I [like] sex my way any kind but there’s something wrong in the total sense of masturbatory insistence and franticness of that. He says generally “I have no feelings—never had.” I mean we ball as ever still but read on. His stomach is bad—nausea at meals, maybe ulcers. His suf fering is—well not suffering, his pain or dissociation from contact or good sweet kicks is more and more autonomous, more overloaded, heavy He sees it, no way out for him he says once in a while, drives faster. I do all I can to make it with him—as friend I mean,—I don’t really care about the cock—it seems too dislocated for that. (I mean this judgment does not come from morbid lusting turning sour exactly.) Would be willing to take vows of leave him alone etc. if he only would be sweet and care-ful again and open to gentle kicks and images and poetry and digging things of all natures—and no time for kicks on jazz—he’s too busy—Chess. Or if we did go it would be a ragged fury of being too high driving too fast, all too hot and horrible. Well he and I love each other, it’s all there no doubt, but everything seems impossible as far as any real contact and natural enjoyment. He really gets no kicks from me as Allen or Levinsky or poet or old memory friend. I mean he does and I too from him but it’s so fast it’s unreal and most of the time driven into the background grim reality nothingnesses that happen. As for Carolyn, I know or imagine she has suffered as wife perhaps to justify any way she is now but I have strong impression she’s a kind of death—she doesn’t dig new things (statues or paintings when pointed out)—mean she has no active curiosity or aesthetic or kicks interests and lives by this ruinous single track idea of running the family according to her ideas strictly, ideas which are mad copies of House Beautiful and are really nowhere in addition to being unreal on account of the horror of the house and the need for some real force of compassion or insight or love or Tao, or whatever. Maybe it’s impossible. She’s a hysteric type—that is, shifting layers of dishonesty which I first didn’t dig but do so now. Will take it or leave it, it is only my reaction to the general scene. I felt relieved to get out to poverty—work worries free of the mad hassle of anxiety at the house, alone in Frisco. And if I feel relieved to get out of a situation with Neal there must be something screwy somewhere. I know what I was doing there with Neal sounds on the surface like a monstrous thing, as Carolyn with some justice suddenly exploded out with, but that isn’t the cause of their woes, she forbade me by the way to ever see him again. I have horror of such insensitivity to the total situation insisted on as the right, self righteous final eternal etc. Oh well enuf of this it is too nasty and I can’t give the picture as I saw it. But I mean I felt evil around me—her vehemence and the feeling of horror I had reminded me of moments in the N.J. hospital when my mother was seized by a fit of frenzied insistent accusation and yelled at me that I was a spy If you remember the story I told you about the sense of finality and absolute tired despair and hopeless futility I felt when at age 14 I took my mother on a mad horrible trip to Lakewood where I left her to fall apart in paranoiac fear with shoe in hand surrounded by cops in a drugstore. I felt the same tired inevitability and impossibility of fact and mad horror listening to Carolyn, and afterward—tired exhausted feeling in the back, want to go off somewhere else from the impossible end of communication and sleep it off. That’s disappeared since I’ve been here running around, but it hasn’t disappeared in San Jose, for Neal who lives in hell and for her who lives in hell, and I guess the children. The thing that is bad about it all is that unless he or she can do something anything almost I don’t see how he will not be injured—wracked wrecked, destroyed—life fucked, I thought when I read Visions of Neal, “You haven’t told me anything new” because I didn’t understand how he could “just go blank”—he’s too great—too much natural force, sweetnesses, divinity in fact, soul,—power, perception, mental beauty gravity, greatness—simply to blank it up - it would have to drive up and out of him. I mean beauty would have to spring out of him somehow—he could not live without life, tender sweet springing gaiety mental gaiety life, imagination all that he has like the colossus of old which he really has—it can’t just go blank, it would have to go blank into a divine Tao silence—but not an unholy mean blank. If so he would have to suffer a madness for the lost feeling, lost love, lost whatever that is holy and is there. The force will drive itself out to expression even if it be madness, suicide, nastiness, T, chess, driving, harsh sex—arguing with Carolyn. (I wrote in Harlem:
A very dove will have her love
Ere the dove has died
The spirit craven in a cove
will even love in pride
And cannot love, and yet can hate
Spirit to fulfill
The spirit cannot watch and wait
The hawk must have his kill.
The hawk must have his kill.)
I may be nightingale, you may be gull, Neal may be hawk—though we are all does at soul.
But if this were all—Perhaps nothing is really lost in life, I mean, it all evens out, he will be alright—but I have seen my mother gone beyond conceivable human horror in living death and it is not all right there—horrible things happen. I see I am making it maybe worse than it is with Neal. He will survive and maybe something will happen to deliver him from torment, or perhaps it is not unrelieved torment. Essentially all he has to do really is realize everything is all right if he can only start living as far as seeking feeling and worth again according to his heart or imagination. But it is so tangled and unrelieved the monotony of the drear to him. Do you dig what I mean? Like a kind of madness, a living dream he is dreaming that has taken over his body. I am not sure how you will think of this—too hung up and not disinterested enough in a Tao-acceptance way watching ants devour a worm—but though there is nothing we can do I say fuck the Tao, I am the Tao and my life doesn’t live for this kind of drear or trash or lack or whatever bitch it is—ain’t no reason to be indifferent to Neal’s woe, the fucking worms. He ain’t no dream he’s real. Only worry is, here—am I exaggerating—have I the wrong slant? Have I misinterpreted what I see? Am I Levinsky yapping in a cafeteria about madness? I’d almost rather take that cross, I’m used to it, than understand that what I am saying about the life of Neal is true, god knows if it is, it seems so now. Yes there is an edge of Levinsky in all this. My standards of what he should be like and what he is like are so personal, but beyond that there is something really fucking up like Blake’s worm or a Hardy tragedy in San Jose with King Neal. Lucien who never dug Neal’s kindness or pathos or communication empathy or aspiration would take this above I suppose for immature shit and there’s a lot of it there but there is also, I think, something more basic than that.
Well, Bill writes he leaves September 7 from Gibraltar and he’ll get here sooner or later. God knows what will happen. Jack boy now get on the ball. I will be trying to make it perhaps with Sheila, trying anyway. I will do everything I can for and to Bill, anything he wants, but the impossibilities of his demands are ultimately inescapable unless I let him carry me off forever to Asia or something to satisfy his conception of his despair and need. You must try and now straighten him out, you know. I’m not that [much] a bitch or unwilling to go to any lengths to help out. I do like him and would love to share a place with him here if it could be done which it will be, but he is going to be frantic and possessive you know. He was (against his own will) having tantrums of jealousy in N.YC., even over Dusty he was annoyed. The situation with Sheila will be a madhouse. I don’t know how to manage it. Bill will enforce his idea so much he will make me reject it and take it as a hopeless horror. He has of course calmed down a lot since midsummer, but he still puts all his life in my hands. Even I never went that far. So you must make him understand to go easy It’s not a crisis of final communication, etc. Whatever it is—it is whatever he sees it as of course, except for the basic mutual bond which is so final and permanent which seems now unreal to him unless he possesses my very thoughts equal to his—it’s a real bitch man. So you must try to give him some kind of strength or Tao and O.K. hipness to the situation so that he doesn’t make a horror of it. I can’t be his one sole and only contact forever, I can only be his nearest and best. Well you know, whatever so long as everybody’s happy with the resources that are at hand. Christ what a situation. Surrounded by mad saints all clawing at each other and I the most weird? And tell Lucien to talk to Bill. He certainly knows about symbiosis and ought to have a helpful constructive word. As for me I am resolved to be patient and as un-evil as I can manage.
No time to describe—too tired—North Beach—characters—one mad Peter DuPeru (who has gestures and same tone as Peter Van Meter and both are from Chicago). But DuPeru (what a mad Subterranean name!) is also like Solomon a Zen ex amnesia-shock patient who wears no socks and is always beat and sensitive and curious and interested and has the best mystic mind I’ve met here. Digs me too. We talk—have walked together him telling me about various Baroque and Regency and City Hall weirdness of architecture all over S.F.
And our friend Bob Young, why my dear I believe it is the very same little black angel I once did already make it with on E. 7th Street no less perhaps a year ago—ask him. Wears fine clothes? very sad sweet, yes it must be he, even the name I seem to remember. We met drunk at the White Horse. Actually a sad occasion, it made me shudder.
As for the American Revolution it
was a revolution wasn’t it? The “traditional dissenters”—well the Tories weren’t dissenting it was our forefathers, the Paines. But Hinkle
25 (nor I) don’t favor revolution or conquest of U.S. by Red-East. Maybe Hinkle does, come to think of it. All I am saying is that the U.S. is in the hands of people like the publishers you hate and they are fucking us up in the rest of the world’s Spenglerian schemes. We should be feeding Asia not fighting her at this point. And if we actually do (for some mad reason) fight, it’ll be the end. The Reds are what Burroughs thinks they are—evil—probably —but enough bullshit on this. Yes, Al is kind, and so Helen too at time of crisis in Cassady household—they put me straight on the horror. I thought I might be going mad. They knew.
No more long letters, but short notes occasionally when there’s news. Keep me informed on pleasant news of publishing. No space to talk about Shakespeare. I like your Tao, it’s more humane. I also have read some Chinese cloud mountain—for as said in the
Green Auto, “Like Chinese magicians, confound the immortals with an intellectuality hidden in the mist.” And my poem also by the way on Sakyamuni (who brought Buddhism to China) coming out of the mountain. I got most of my titles about it all from digging the
pictures of the cloudy mountains and the sages that the arhats
26 painted—
dig dig dig at the N.Y Public Library Fine Arts room the great collections of Chinese paintings—visions of the physical Tao, if one can get a spiritual insight from the painter’s material vision of the mountains receding into vast dream infinities series of mountains separated by infinities of mist. The paintings of the infinite worlds of mountains were my favorite, and next the great belly rubbing or beat or horrible looking W C. Fields arhats in rags with long ears or giggling together over manuscripts of poems about clouds.
Also there is a book, The White Pony, ed. Robert Payne, which is translation of all kinds from thousands years Chinese Buddhist—Taoist poetry—easy to read, such a pleasure, so many—and Bill Keck has my marked copy of this book, unless he’s given it to someone. Tell him “I ask him for Balloon’s sake to recover it and give to you if it’s not an impossible hassle”—if you see him.
When you send me essay on Buddha? I read it with pleasure.
Quite right about No Direction in Void—Bill too eager for that and there’s no place to go but where he is and I am already and that’s what’s causing the hassle. [ ... ]
[In October 1954, while Ginsberg was living in Sheila’s apartment on Pine Street, he had a vision in the lights of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel’s upper-story windows. He felt the mighty presence of Moloch, the Old Testament god of the Ammonites and Phoenicians to whom children were sacrificed, and it inspired him to write his most famous poem, Howl.]
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Jack Kerouac [n.p.] November 9, 1954
Dear Jack:
My rage was annoyance but I generally understood and took it as a minor thing. Certainly not enuf to make me think of not writing. Yes Bill has become too strange for me to live in such close quarters with—not absolutely frightening but I knew it would end in some kind of absolute sad idiocy, particularly with me off all the time with Sheila. But even without chick [woman], too much. Still I invited him finally to come here, I didn’t want to put him down at soul. We are corresponding again. He’s more distant. It’s easier to read his letters. How hard it all is—I have to confess that as far as I’m concerned I dig Bill as ever and have no objection to anything and feel like an ego fool for the whole season but what could I do or should or whatever. I don’t care really about straightness with chick or anything like that—I first knew he’d come here and I’d get him all involved and vice versa and there’d be a bust with the cops ultimately and I’d be coming late to work and have to sit and listen to him and routines mercilessly applauding and so on. I wasn’t interested enough, I might be sometime when I want to return to saintly solitude and brotherliness to Bill. I lack solitude here and Bill is a power of solitude—got to give him all attention, I had my attentions turned in other (lesser) directions.
Oh, as to what he wrote, he kept saying in letter after letter you agreed with him, I was being coy, I really wanted/needed him then—burlesque. I was mad because it isn’t is it?—really a queer matter, but Bill was like making it one. My objection wasn’t to queerness but to the wild strange frightening (antipathetic symbiotic) uncanny Bill chill thrill. Too much. Also the horrors with Caroline [Carolyn Cassady] and thru the affair with Sheila—too much. My formal reject letter was distracted, I don’t regret it, Bill was driving me to distraction (purposely?) by letter—how much worse in person? But as for why I got so mad, man you should read his letter specter zipping around me. Enuf of this draggy matters. I made it against my will in N.Y.C. by the way I’m not sorry but no more.
Sure I’m crazy I begin at the local analytic clinic tomorrow—$1.00 an hour. Don’t bust a gut.
I’m not a devil neither are you, stop saying things like that. I just thought you were on an angelic type jig so to speak, gleefully siccing Bill on -but really he’s so far gone or was, you might just as well have humored him. In the long run the same thing that made you tell him white lies—the same madness—made me yell at him. I did everything I could not do for half a year.
A cat by the way sits on my shoulder as I write this. Me and Lucien were secretive because we were sinning and joyful and ashamed and abashed in front of you, afraid you’d look sour on us—if you’d any likelihood of joining the ball we’d not have been secretive—perhaps you would have anyway—but we were only secretive 5 minutes at a time when you were knocking on that door remember? That doesn’t count as secretive, we were just goofing the flesh away in secret. He’d laugh at me for admitting we were secretive probably.
Sheila has a Canuck brother-in-law Paul Tremblay of Boston environs. We talk Kanuk [Canuck] together on occasion. Big sad sweet salesman whose wife hasn’t laid him in 3 months, about our age (30-33) and generation. I told him to read T&C [The Town and the City].
Because of living in splendor with girl I do no reading no writing. Probably coming to the end of this, I’ll move in a month or so and get secret nice pad on side street run-down height of Nob Hill I’ve elected, under a great concrete basement of the next top-of-hill block for $35 a month save money and read and write and pray to solitude. Have you yet seen Liang Kai’s (Southern Sung) Chinese picture of Sakyamuni Coming Out of the Mt. of Enlightenment? It’s on the cover of Edward Conze’s book on Zen—in any metaphysical bookstore—and in some of the collections of classic Chink art in the Fine Arts room at Public 42nd St. Library Do look at the pictures. Remember how you dug the Bacchuses and bosoms of Titian and Hals, those of the West? Dig Chinese art—(paintings). But dig particularly that portrait of an arhat at the very moment of enlightenment. It will fit in your picture I mean also. So when I move, anyway I promise to begin reading Buddha for you according to instruction.
Rexroth has Bill’s book reading it. He advises at New Directions. He invited me to reading poetry at a series he’s a manager of connected with a college here. Auden, Williams, local poets including me. Sometime next month perhaps.
Damned Belson
27 read
Yage and put Bill down, refused to read Queer, the movie is all off. What madness inspires these semi-ignus? He gave me some peyote, I got hi with Sublette and Sheila and we dug S.E midtown cable cars clanging skyline—looked out my living room vast window down into the bldgs.—especially the Sir Francis Drake hotel—which has a Golgotha-robot —eternal—smoking machine crowned visage made up of the two great glassbrick eyes on either side (the toilets men and women of the Starlight Room)—upstarting out of the paved mist ground—I wrote on it.
Skeletons have no cocks—no cunts in the cemeteries, great line, and Sublette made it with Sheila behind my back weeks ago. Well, that’s the way the ball bounces (as Al. S. says all the time.) He read yr. last letter. I’ll write Burford.
What Cowley article? I wrote asking, hearing some rumor of it, but never saw—when and where? Neal wants also to know. We ran to San Jose Library while I was there and I thumbed thru back issues of Saturday Review of Literature. So send copy or name and date of mag. for my interest please? I will send or bring you Naked Lunch in i month after Rexroth is done with it. I am going to type up my poems and reproduce them on a machine I have in the office (Ozalid machine) and make up and bind 25 copies of a book and send you 1 in a month. My brother Eugene is getting married and will send me plane fare. So I will be in N.Y C. for a week (possibly) around the 18th of December. He’s marrying “The minister’s daughter” if you remember her, a sort of meek blonde he’s been making it with for 2 years. Both families somewhat miffed but accepting it. Anyway I will be there, you must come too (Riverside Church 125th St. I think)—So I mean, I hope to be in N.Y.C. in a month for a week, see you, confess, talk Buddha. I’ve told Bill. He may be on his way thru NYC to Tangier by then. So there may be a convention. [ ... ]
As to Neal: Since I been settled down here he comes by every week to borrow Miss Green [marijuana] or bring Miss Green. Last few times rushed in and out with Lucien, a high grotesque black man from Howard St., his pimp for Miss Green, unrolled her on the floor and proceeded to manicure and blow in midafternoon while I wandered around turning on and off lights and carried garbage downstairs and picked up child’s toys. One thing I must say I can see what a strain it has been for him to try and maintain a family household and at the same time run a mad pad. Sheila digs him, of course, but he’s been very good about not coming on with her. He came up one nite, settled comfortably on the white rug, got hi, and in the shadow of the Dank Monster looming in the window (which he dug immediately) read aloud from Proust for an hour, a quiet sweet nite. Standing by the imitation fireplace: Peter DuPeru (whom I’ve described?) DuPeru has been here 2 weeks and we’ve finally gotten his finances straight and he’s in a hotel now. Very great cat, worthy of the best of N.Y Rexroth calls him the White Plague. I think he’s very droll -a sweeter thinner Solomon, more forgetful, full of curious innocuous obsessions—spends hours in bathroom (Huncke-like). Sleeps with pillows on foot, walks around with bottles of Vicks or J&J Baby Oil or garlic filling pockets, has an income (18 a week), learned in Zen, most front teeth out, growing a French 19th century thin Balzac beard (sideburns running along edge of chin, not under or over) wears dirty blue suede shoes, lumberjack shirt, frayed Levis, no socks, walks all over town, knows Yeats by heart, completely bumbling and innocent toothless smile on young face—as the time he turned on the radio too loud and (unobserved) fumbled with it inefficiently and began saying shush, making a shushing gesture impatiently humbly with his palm. Then smiled toothless (unobserved) smile at self secretly.
Well Neal says I shd. write you for him. He is always rushing around. So he keeps telling me—“you know what to tell him, we’re buddies, etc.” He will be cut off the R.R. sometime early January. He wants to go to Mex City for kicks for a week or a few days, then go booming in Florida, and then go rush up to N.YC. for a day or 2 and then return to Frisco to job. Carolyn threatens to quit if he goes booming, wants him to get a filling station job in Los Gatos. He as yet seems undecided whether or not he can get away with it, but he’s been talking about it since I first arrived. So he wants you to know his general plan. I don’t think I’ll go with him to D.F.—Scared of his driving, and I’ll be working still, then, I suppose. Saving $ for Europe or the East. Anyway he wanted me to write you for him. Consider him. He’s up for 3 investigations, everybody on the R.R. whispers about him blasting, “everybody knows I’m a cunt hound,” Carolyn hasn’t laid him in 3 months. I’ll tell him I wrote. He seems lately a little cooler however than in the Hotel Marconi days—a few months ago. I even played him a game of chess. He’s taught chess to Sublette and half of North Beach. Sublette beat him. He’s still on Cayce, will bring it up out of nowhere on every visit. If I say something other than Cayce he says with a forbearing smile, “Well that’s because you don’t really understand Cayce.” No news from Carolyn. Do you have his Los Gatos address? 18231 Bancroft Los Gatos.
Gerd Stern and MacClaine came up the other day and spent a spooky midnite. I didn’t recognize MacClaine for an hr., kept ignoring him. He said there were only a few great poets lately “Lamantia, John Hoffman and himself (& Stern) and Ginsberg.” How polite. Then I talked on phone to him called him up a week later and he ran on and on breathlessly making surrealist jokes. Wha!? Well I’ll go make it over to his house in N. Beach later. And to Stern’s in Mill Valley. And Pippin in Berkeley. And all thru, slowly. I haven’t had time to myself to run around on account of domesticity which as I say is coming to an end soon, so will soon now that I know the city be taking long fog shrouded walks into the valleys between hills here. By the way I dug by sight the site of your Transcontinental Tootsie Rolls! Yes! Is it not below San E in South S.F. or nearby visible “marching” up the weird brown hills on the left side of the road coming by auto visible up Bloody Bayshore “the ribbon of death” from San Jose to S.E? Your poems I still will not write on yet, closing this long letter, but they are good I agree and truly believe not to be shrugged off for unevenness of them by me (or you as in last letter)—seeds of nakedness are there which is the pure inspiration of poetry and without which not valuable at all, with which anything goes. You (and perhaps I) will begin a literature with them.
What is happening with yr. art? Send me, yet, the Buddha book to read.
Love to Lucien, Dusty,—how is J. Kingsland? etc? I saw N.Y. subterranean painter loft owner Paul Beatty (friend of Anton [Rosenberg], Keck etc. at whose loft the Alan Eager—Bru Moore sessions were once held) here at the wino opening of a new stable art gallery great evening.
Love,
Allen
[One of the most important occurrences in Ginsberg’s life was the day he met Peter Orlovsky. Peter became Allen’s companion for the next forty years. The following letter, written just after they met, described the event in detail.]
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Jack Kerouac [NY?] December 29, 1954
Dear Kind King Mind:
I’m sick, kind Kerouac, your hallowed Allen
Is sick in eternity! laboring lonesome
and worse and worse by the day by the hour...
but I need a little sweet conversation
sad as the tears of that great prince Sebastian.
28 (after Catullus)
Fraid you were mad then because of me unkind, the paper, was unkind. Never yet have seen Alistair Sim, I’m sick, home a day from work, deep cold, penicillin, I’m deaf almost, sick with love again also, moved to Gough Street artist bohemian pad, Sheila comes surprise dressed up on her lunch hour to find me in clothes sweating in cell on pallet on floor, Neal is giggling and playing games with redhead [Natalie Jackson] in other room down the hall, I’m in love with 22 year old saint boy who loves me, lives there too, but terrible scene is here. I ran into painter Robert LaVigne, ignu-deep souled 26 year Polk-Sutter beard a month ago, we went up to see his paintings, walking up Sutter from Polk-Sutter Fosters Cafeteria where I went one night drunk to dig subterranean scene and look for Peter Carl—Sol DuPeru (who I met first nite in Sublette’s room here in SF), so I went up to beard lonely to ask after DuPeru who he did-n’ t know, we talked, he invited me to see paintings, went to house on Gough St. I walked in room—this was a month ago—and saw huge modern true painting of naked youth, and others of same, clothed and unclothed. Then in walked the boy his model, who painter, made it with too, gentle souled tall Russian red Kafka, respectful, silent, and so I came back that week, expected, and began season—great house, I told you, I brought Neal to dig the redhead girl, he made it with her last week and thereafter—long hall, big messy rooms, tea in kitchen, just like youth, we gather, talk, Neal rushes in 9AM WC Fields—Oliver Hardy pulling on or off his pants, makes it with girl, laughs again, puts on her clothes, she his vest, they blast,—and he and I agree on nostalgia of the front door, we’ve both gained so much tender youth kicks in last 2 weeks entering the apartment first floor of huge Victorian wood house, big smell of paintings and studio for LaVigne up front, Peter Orlovsky studying in a room in the middle (he’s the boy) and Natalie the ex-Stanley Gould girlfriend here for 4 months in the back—so sweet and promising 115th St. tender joys entering the house again, for me, Neal feels same like I say so one night before I leave for NYC—LaVigne telling me he’s leaving, mysterious, leaving town to go paint (after his show running now, wild colored nudes and pix of Fosters) near San Diego, end of his season with Peter as perhaps mine ended when I left Houston for Dakar Doldrums, so he says he’s leaving, will I see please Peter much when he’s gone, needs a friend, needs sweet companion, I shudder, I see the love, I’m doomed, my heart melts again—how I hate women, can’t stand not to be in love, can’t stand not to be melting with real tenderness, childlike need sweetnesses, that’s what’s wrong with me and Sheila, I don’t love like sad love can be, my heart’s chill there. So I tell LaVigne, OH, god not again, what lord are you asking me for? I can’t kneel and cocksuck forever like of old—but he says Peter knows and digs me, mind, man, I’m changed in Calif., like a dream—I’ve waited for. So I went to NYC with that in mind, except also a night I spend there and talk to Peter who tells me he dreamt that he had walked up to me, put arms round my waist, I was surprised in dream. Then in hall in life, embraced, real sweetness in my breast, too much, I’d almost cry but it’s such poor pitiful fleeting human life, what do I want anyway? Nature boy - to be loved in return. So followed a night of embraces, not sex. Then NYC, then I return, move out of Sheila’s to here—meanwhile, she suddenly digs Al Hinkle in my absence (in fact had before I left one evening when I was out all night, Al came visiting, got some wine, they talked on the floor rapport)—so in absence she made it with Hinkle, sweet, I am pleased—so she waits for him one night, I’m in NYC, then she goes out, he cuts by doesn’t know where she is, nor know I’m in NY, he goes up to Polk and Sutter Fosters looking for me or her, she has just left there, he goes up to the Gough street house, looking for Ginsberg, redhead says I’m away, he asks to flop for few hours, sleeps, wakes up, goes to take a piss, turns hall corner, there’s naked Neal bumping into him (he didn’t know Neal ever was there—all in my absence) they laugh, the circles of Dostoyevsky in this house. I return, everybody making it full blast, Peter having got hi first time with Neal and redhead Natalie and suddenly DUG also, in strange drooling Peter Lorre way—he’s a Myshkin too—BUT alas, now the sad horrors begin, LaVigne also digs me, I make it with him in bed, for life’s sake tho not really want to, then when I move here we set up bed, all three of us making it in same bed, but I only dig Peter really, Peter begins guilty only digging me, tho all love Robert LaVigne for sad genius ignu self and beard he wears—and one thing, I can’t understand why he’s bowing out, what genius of sad knowledge of loss he had (as I had with Neal in Texas)—meanwhile Peter and I have mad conversations about Thought, I read Visions of Neal aloud to Natalie and all, Neal expected hourly again, night of wild balling with Peter with Bob there too—and then Bob (LaVigne) goes mad, sees self losing, Peter changing, I seem smug and over bestial, he’s angry won’t speak, locks self in room with Peter to plead, threaten? I never heard, we try to talk, Bob and I being more or less equal souls, fruits, can’t say hate and love each other, Peter scared and guilty and faithful to Robert, I suffer now, anger in the house, all wrought up for days, who will kill who? But I not want to deceive or offend Robert so drag pallet into my lone room, tension yet mounts, Bob feels I’ve betrayed him, I’m falling more in love, he’s falling more in despair—love though he is leaving any week now, still can’t give up hope for golden love boy, he thinks I’m evil mocking (Hal Chase thought) grabbing kid fast for kicks, Peter meanwhile promised to me, promise fades, we finally all three meet in kitchen and evil hate scenes, Peter loving both, old fidelities, new sensual mental kicks, Bob and I digging each other perhaps the most yet thru clouds of fear, the maya mists, irony between us, he accusing, I can’t stand it as he thinks I’m being dirty toward Peter, but I love, meanwhile Peter more and more offended by scene we can’t stop as it’s in cards—Robert saying “You’re both waiting for me to kick off so you can make it together.” I saying, “We can’t have a rose without your blessing —rose requires perfection which you added don’t take it away now.” Robert saying, “I won’t again” irony Peter saying finally ah comedies, “You’re both a pain in the ass”—only Burroughs would appreciate. But finally we all melting in sadness, I can’t hide that I want, Robert can’t hide that he too wanted, Peter that he didn’t need—his innocence going to see us old farts go woeful, he also wants girls, after all, as well as teacher kind king mind yet sweet prince would love us too, and me after all these hopeless years—that is to say this be some self deception but actual promise of Peter nature more harmonious for kind of sweet comradeship than any other I had yet met, I having given up hoping long ago, so now hardly begun to thaw to the rue and sadness of love, just beginning tonight in my sick bed. Well we all made up in a kind, Peter to go alone, Bob to go alone, I alone, Sheila appearing at noon digging my kick sadly, she loves me, I dig her but can’t make it, with final conversation neither of us really wanting to betray Robert between self and Peter, that we would wait and see—but already in sad old love hear I know it never came that way, that easy unless this was prelude of torments to some bliss, will never manifest with such innocence again, I’m sad, lay in bed sweating with cold, too olden to really remember self pities of 18-20 again, but unhappy till I began thinking of the unlikely possible accidental sweetnesses of life, maybe that’s all they are, transient. And in his journal (where I peeked tho he would have killed me) Robert writing suffering lines about god shaping him with torment to bareness and true beauty he really digs, though we can’t talk.
So the situation stands now, Natalie making me tea to drink, meanwhile rent is due, Robert due to leave, house to break up, I have to find new pad or hotel—will move in or near area near Peter and Polk Gulch in some hotel for two weeks till paycheck comes enough to get small pad, meanwhile reading Visions of Neal and San Francisco Blues.
Yes, I know maybe you will wind up throwing up arms at life’s mess and accept it Dickens’ way but I still say Jack that though I did not attain sanctity because I was too egotistically hung upon the idea of pure vision continuous in order to be saint, and had no stern bare guru who KNEW, just Van Dorens who made me doubt—there is the goal of the Nameless that is the most worthy for us if we’ve the faith or insight to persist (I wait for life like this to break me down to no attachments maybe because none so sublime as I can emotionally imagine exist
not even the human
imagination satisfies
the endless emptiness
of the soul
(This silly simpleminded after all our conversation and your last letter) maybe to a point where as before I’ll sit in silence cooking vegetables again as I did in 49 in Harlem hopeless till my door was silent and silently swung open and let in heaven’s light) to persist in seeking it whatever way is offered, directer the better. But what a madness gamble it is. I’ll try to live it up first, then die again, when I’m sure there’s nothing left in life for me to dig of beauty but that’s almost endless, at least sadness is, recurrent. So practice the Dhyana
29 and bring me holy news. [ ... ]
Allen
[In this short letter Ginsberg mentioned his new poem, Howl, and the Six Gallery reading, famous as the place where the Beat Generation first appeared onstage together. Allen also mentioned that Peter Orlovsky has just returned from New York with his mentally handicapped brother, Lafcadio.]
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Jack Kerouac [Mexico City, Mexico] mid-August 1955
Dear Jack:
Received your letter several days ago, then Peter Orlovsky blew into SF with kid brother, 15 years old hungup on toilet rituals, and getting everybody settled.
Robert LaVigne the painter is somewhere near Mazatlan, if I get his address I’ll send it to you, on your way up you can sleep on his floor and eat.
If you still have dysentery, you know the Enteroviaforma brownpill cure, if it persists I understand a heavy shot of antibiotics is good—Terramyacin, I believe.
I enclose first draft scribble notes of a poem I was writing, nearer in your style than anything. My book has 50 pages complete and another 50 to go still I think. It won’t be finished by summer end. I will unless you persuade me that my sight saver lies elsewhere go to Berkeley I found a cheap house ($35 per month) one room, a Shakespearean Arden cottage with brown shingles and flowers all about, big sweet garden, private, apricot tree, silence, a kitchen and bathroom too, windows on sunlight, near Shattuck (Key System trolley) Avenue, 6 blocks from school, perfect place to retreat be quiet, which is my desire since I am more absorbed in writing than before. I will have to go to work in compassionate hospital possibly to support self, and start MA work, course on Anglo Saxon they require and whatnot, not, and so will be alone there and so you will be welcome to settle there for 1 year 2 years, a month, however long, there’ll be all foods around, I eat well, little money but enough to get into SF, we’ll make out alright. I will be here at 1010 Montgomery Street for 3 more weeks or perhaps more, and move across bay around September 5. Neal has apartment in town for you to stay in if you want to flop over in city anytime. My original invitation to come stay here etc. still same except now the cottage with garden makes it more Shakespearean Bhikku retired, better.
An art gallery here asked me to arrange poetry reading program this fall, maybe you and I and Neal one night give a program; also we can record and broadcast whatever we want on Berkeley radio station KPFA.
I have been seeing big Berkeley professors but I am anonymous nobody and can impress no one with nothing so I will have to work for a year, after I can have money from schools and make it thru PhD’s Fulbrights to Asia Harvards wherever I hope. I guess I have to do this route for the moment, otherwise just work anywhere when money runs out and not be preparing for anything as far as money future. What you think?
Letter from Bill, he wants me to go to South America bisexual tribes, but how can I? no gold.
Come up here keep me company there’s no one to talk to. I am continuing Surangama Sutra. Also I am reading surrealist poetry and Lorca, translating Catullus from Latin.
I will see [Karena] Shields the Mexico woman and tell her you’ll leave your address at the U.S. embassy for her, she’ll probably pass thru Mexico City in a week or two.
I was thinking, would you be able to order Mescaline Sulfate from the Delta Drug Co. thru Mexican pharmacy and bring it up here? I’ll send check for that, find out? Delta Chemical Works, 23 West 60th Street, NY 23, NY, it costs $7.00 a small bottle.
I’ll write soon. Write, come for sure.
Love
Allen
[ ... ] I also want to get piano and study basic music, write blues poems.
Since Peter been away I’ve been writing a lot, solitude after all this year is good for me though I go blue depression mad in it too. I can’t stand life.
Don’t get mad at me, come when thou wilst, don’t come only on account of Eugene’s $25, but come anyway soonest, make it in peaceful milk in Shakespearean house.
I am trying to shepherd 15 year old Orlovsky around thru life right now, like being married and having overgrown problem child, crazy kicks, pathos of real life. They’ll take an apartment in town here, I’ll move to Berkeley and get away from it all.
Guy Wernham the translator of Lautreament is in furnished room across street, comes over and translates Genet for me, Genet poetry drinks tea and shudders dignified and lost like Bill, looks like a sort of Bill without Bill’s genius charm.
I’m alright, actually sort of happy
Also we’ll have a car to loll in.
Love
Ginsberg
[The following is the first letter in which Ginsberg quoted lines from his new poem, Howl.]
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Eugene Brooks [New York, NY] August 16, 1955
Dear Gene:
Heard about your accident from Lou last week & meant to write; received your letter. I wonder what Woodstock looks like now—is the old cottage by the stream by the bridge we lived in still standing, and is that monstrous superhighway traffic circle in town center still as vast as it once seemed? And is that copy of Eyeless in Gaza still on the table downstairs in the cottage? Were the rocks in the swimming hole still as fantastically worn by water? And that meadow infinity behind the house? & does the poison ivy bloom behind the moon still? [ ... ]
I’m expecting as of now barring troubles to settle at Berkeley for a year or so, have put in bid for $35 per mo. Ivy-covered one room (plus kitchen & bath) cottage on side street, garden and apricot tree around, private and Shakespearean. Will have to get job, in hospital or restaurant nearby work part-time. Still haven’t been accepted but sent in registration $5 fee and got Columbia records etc, etc.
Senora Shields of Mexico in and out of town, have seen her a few times. Kerouac out on road on way here, he received your money, thank you for sending it.
Thanks for the manuscript I had a duplicate. Am over the hump on a collection of last 4 years’ work and writing in a new style now, long prose poem strophes, sort of surrealist, & reading a lot of Spanish and French modern poetry Lorca, Apollinaire, & some Latin, still on Catullus. Catullus really worth looking at in edition an anthology of all translations edited by someone named Aiken, probably in Columbia library if you liked Tacitus. The new style: example : referring to Carl Solomon
“... who presented himself on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven head and harlequin speech of suicide demanding instantaneous lobotomy
and who was given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
and who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic ping pong table ...”
and other Who’s Who’s & images (this from a long catalogue)
“who screamed on all fours in the subway, and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who loned it thru the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels who were visionary Indian angels,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a package of cigarettes a bottle of beer a chick or a candle and fell off the bed and continued on the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with an ultimate vision of cunt eluding the last come of consciousness,
who bit detectives in the neck and howled with delight in police cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who digested rotten animals lung heart tail feet borscht and tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who tramped all night on the snowbank docks with bloody feet looking for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam heat and opium,
who picked themselves up out of alleyways hung up with heartless Tokay and horrors of iron and stumbled off to unemployment offices,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested crabs at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx until the noise of wheels and children brought them down wide eyed and battered bleak of brain mouth wracked all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,”
etc. etc.
goes on for 5 pages. This is more or less Kerouac’s rhythmic style of prose, ends “the actual heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.” Elegy for the generation, etc.
also, “who mopped all night in desolate Bickfords listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.”
I have been looking at early blues forms and think will apply this form of elliptical semisurrealist imagery to rhymed blues type lyrics. Nobody but Auden’s written any literary blues forms, his are more like English ballads, not purified Americana. Blues forms also provide a real varied syncopated meter, with many internal variants and changes of form in midstream like conversational thought. Most of my time is actually occupied with this type thought and activity writing a lot and therefore beginning to change style, get hot, invent and go on interesting kicks thanks to courtesy of U.S. government leisure. I never spent it better. Still have quite a few weeks left but will cut short probably for Berkeley
Still having trouble collecting $$ from Wyn Co. royalties on Burroughs book, they’re holding out present royalties against possible future returns and in addition by estimating next 3 yrs. returns wind up with figures with him ultimately in red. This is strictly shyster publisher practice. I would sue them for the 88$ they presently owe but it seems technically hopeless—tho I’m not sure —Rexroth says to forget it since they’re infamous shysters (he’s had trouble with them in past too). Do you have Burroughs’ contract on file anywhere? He’s in Tangier, writing, doing alright, unhappy like an old rubber tire indestructible, his letters piling up, pathetic, brilliant, Kafka-Celine comedy great Rabelaisian appetite for seedy humor, writing a sort of surrealist satire fable about life in decadent Tangier. Cowley is writing an introduction for a Kerouac novel and asked to see Burroughs’ work so I sent him 3 vols. of opus called Naked Lunch. After that he looks at my book. Have you seen Céline’s Guignol’s Band published last year yet? It’s as good as best Celine.
Sheila [Williams] my old lovedoll here got married last month. My old boss is writing a cookbook. The fog’s in on SF hills. I went to the planetarium today Had steak for supper.
Love.
Allen
[The end of the summer of 1955 was a seminal period in Ginsberg’s life. He met many of the people associated with the Beat Generation and it was the Six Gallery reading that brought many of those poets together for the first time. ]
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to John Allen Ryan
30 [Mexico City, Mexico] mid-September 1955
Dear Johnny:
Your letter September something received, and also your previous one, and the poems, and I think one of mine crossed in the mails; and I also wrote Uni-vac (no relation to Kerouac) (latter a Breton name) you would be in D.E; I hope you did meet; and that you were not too much of a cool Zen and that he was not too much of a Mahayana sourpuss; and that Garver put you on one way or another. [ ... ]
Hendrix asked me if I wanted to organize a poetry reading at the Six, and I didn’t several months ago, not knowing of any poetry around worth hearing, but changed my fucking mind, and so you will be glad to know the tradition continues with a gala evening sometime in a month or so or shorter, the program being Rexroth as introducer McClure reading new poems (he thinks, it’s partly true, he’s found his own natural voice—it sounds a little tightassed to me but he is writing well and that’s maybe the way god built him), Lamantia putting in an appearance to read John Hoffman’s work (which I haven’t really seen for years, if it isn’t poetry it’ll be a great social occasion), myself to read a long poem the first scraps of which I sent to Kerouac, you might look at it if you see him again. I don’t have a copy or I’d send you a piece (it’s more or less up the alley of your SF recollections in tranquility), and a bearded interesting Berkeley cat name of Snyder, I met him yesterday (via Rexroth suggestion) who is studying oriental and leaving in a few months on some privately put up funds to go be a Zen monk (a real one). He’s a head, peyotlist, laconist, but warmhearted, nice looking with a little beard, thin, blond, rides a bicycle in Berkeley in red corduroy and levis and hungup on Indians (ex anthropology student from some Indian hometown) and writes well, his sideline besides Zen which is apparently calm scholarly and serious with him. Interesting person. IF anybody else turns up along the way to read we may add somebody else. When Kerouac gets to SF probably I’ll try set up another program, Myself, Jack and Neal Cassady (whom you didn’t know in SF?). You might send this bit of 6 gossip to [Jack] Spicer, he’ll probably be pleased that something is being done to continue there. And you might send me any advice on organizing these readings that you can remember from previous experience.
Yes, I’m studying literature at Berkeley I may be able to make a self supporting proposition via some kind of sinecure in 6 months, according to what vague promises I’ve wheedled out of Miles Shorer and a nice one named [Thomas] Parkinson, ex SF Anarchist now English Professor here. I’ll be working scholarly like on prosody problems.
I have a house here for $35 a month, backyard cottage and private backyard, quite big, filled with vegetables and flowers, ideal Camden Whitman cottage, I write a lot, depression, solitude, last night a rare half hour of a kind of animistic ecstasy and weeping in the garden, the vines with leaves turned top up in the night as they were left during the hours of day when the gracious sun rayed on them, the father is merciful; I had a vision of that as I haven’t had in maybe 7 years; a relief, a drop of sweetness. I did some writing and it looks like Christopher Smart. Tell Jack if you see him; but well I’ll write. [ ... ]
Love, as ever
Allen
Allen Ginsberg [Berkeley, CA] to Eugene Brooks [Plainview, NY] December 26, 1955
Dear Gene:
Received your letter and news and $15; (also same day $10 from Louis) very munificent, just like old-fashioned Xmas—I spent the day and had turkey at Cassady’s down the peninsula—and am working (for last 2 weeks Xmas) at Greyhound Bus baggage room, and so now have sizeable small bankroll for short trip northwest. Taft-Hartley act has (lord works in subtle ways his wonders etc.) opened up the shipping unions, so I think I’ll be able to catch ship in 60 days and make some real money for real travel. Also possibility of 4 month round-the-world type cruise job thru unions, tho that’s slight. Anyway I’ve been wondering how to make it to Europe and a 3 or 4 month stretch at sea would set me up for 7 or 8 months on the continent, so I’m applying now, and will wait around here after return from northwest for a ship. When I leave here I’ll probably forward a load of books and phonograph records to you—can you take them? After return from trip (if trip comes off) I’ll head for short stay in NYC (or Plainview) and then take off for Europe. Prospects there are fine, I have friends scattered around, places to stay and people to see and show me around, especially Paris.
Kerouac left here several weeks ago and probably was in Rocky Mount when you were there. He stayed with me for several months, dug the scene, had a good time for awhile, but then got broody and touchy I got mad at him one night, and Rexroth showed him the door the following week, he left down the road to hitchhike home with sleeping bag and knapsack for Xmas. He got a grant of $300 from National Academy of Arts and Sciences thru Cowley I signed libel release and Neal did on his 5 yrs. old novel [On the Road] which Viking seems ready to publish, at least they sent out big legal forms. By the way I have a problem. Legal—my own book is due, the manuscript is due, before I leave here, to be printed in England for economy’s sake, costs only $150 there for 500 copies of 40 page booklet (comprising single poem, Howl for Carl Solomon, Lou saw it)—however City Lights, the people here publishing for me, are afraid it will be held up in customs for obscenity since I use cunts, cocks, balls, assholes, snatches and fucks and comes liberally scattered around in the prosody—the question being, do you know anything about the customs law, appeals, etc. in case there is trouble, or (as I am told) are they likely if they notice it to forthwith burn the books without notice for appeal? The problem is whether I should cut out (which I don’t want to do), chance it, or request book printed here, which City Lights is also willing to do. The problem is not with publisher but with possible customs laws, I expect there will be further use later, as I have been making arrangements for possible cheap publishing to be done for Self, Jack and Bill in Japan, where a friend is going next month—costs only $50 to print a book there. Amazing. Burroughs is getting fantastically dirty in his manuscript but it is high art, but he doesn’t shilly-shally in fact he’s been writing pornography with a vengeance lately, and my own work is full of orgies.
I’ll probably not need any of my furniture or books for a long while, so get them from Paterson and use them as you will, there are some nice pieces that were in my bedroom, a file chest and low bureau that were finished in very good taste and are built modern and low, they were custom-built for someone who liked low furniture in fact. There’s also probably an extra bed leftover in Paterson now?
Statuary: why not wait till I get to NYC? Art objects are an investment, if you go to a regular commercial store you pay very dearly for monotonous Sat. Eve. Post moderns style, you should get some individual work by a young genius, there are probably dozens of such in NYC starving. As I said in letter some time ago, there were people in NYC in 1952 and 1951 whose paintings were selling for 20-40 dollars who are getting 500-1000 now, the situation is still the same. Meyer Shapiro knows who they all are, when I get to NYC I can ask him, or you can look him up in the phone book give him a line about wanting to buy something interesting from good young unknown types, you haven’t much to spend, I think he’ll be happy to connect you—it does everybody a favor. If you want paintings, there is this really great painter Robert LaVigne here, and he sells his from 40-60-80-100, and never gets to sell any even at that price. He also has great interesting drawings. I have a small collection (about 20) of them which I’ll send on with my records, you can use any you like. I mean, as an investment, I myself gave him 60 dollars when I was working in exchange for drawings, and wish I had had more money to get the more elaborate ones I liked even more. The people I knew in NYC are now too expensive to recommend—Wolf Kahn and Larry Rivers. Rivers by the way does some sculpture, it’s probably excellent, maybe expensive now (he’s better known as a painter)—and he has a gallery Tibor De Nagy on 53rd and 3rd Ave. S.E. corner, but that means $$. I don’t know how much you want to spend, but if you’re asked over a hundred for a piece from a retail commercial store for a hack job, you can obviously do much better elsewhere. Anyway don’t buy anything you don’t really like yourself, that’s the only test. But you won’t be ready till say summer so why not wait. There’s nothing I’d like better than to go shopping for sculpture in the dens of Lower East Side. Also it would be better to pay a great deal of money for an interesting minor piece of sculpture from a master like Lipchitz or Giacometti (whose works can be seen at Museum of Modern Art) than waste a cent on meaningless uninspired commercial pieces. Also if you want cheap sculpture reproductions of classics, you can find out about them from the museums, there are companies putting out Greek, Medieval, Mayan, and Chinese copies in heavy Tootsie roll type plastic, cheap. Also, Tibetan scrolls and mandalas, good ones, are cheap (under a hundred) (if you shop well) and are one of the best investments of any kind of art. They are classic, rare, undervalued, the commies are in there prohibiting further exports, little has reached the U.S. since the war and little likely will and the tradition there if kaput probably will raise their value even more. Also they are extremely interesting to look at, the U.S. taste hasn’t found them—tho they’ll be or have been in LIFE this decade—and are generally unknown except by connoisseurs of Asiatic art, hipsters, etc. More popular here on the west coast of course, and prices in NYC better. There’s a shop around 55th and Park-3rd Ave., I don’t remember, small shop, has good ones, not too good condition, but finely painted. I mean there are good and bad Tibetan brushworkers, the condition not too important, like medieval art. I dig their sculpture the most, it’s hair-raising, maybe you have to develop a taste for it tho,—however you can buy incredible 12 armed seated Kali gods with their Shakti smaller paramours seated on their laps screwing, ancient lndian-Tibetan statuary tradition, not at all shocking to have around when you look at them, could have on desk, etc. only a noticing or trained eye could see and even then it’s so unbelievably demonic-classical it’s socially quite unobjectionable, all museums have them. By the way for an idea of all this Tibetan, the Newark Museum top floor has a great small collection—supposed to be the best in the east. If any of the above sounds at all interesting, look at what they have in Newark and inquire where in NY you can get similar type works. However Tibetan sculpture begins to run into the hundreds. The point about buying Asiatic art, is that as yet it’s not in demand really at U.S. prices, it’s future is $$ very good, Asia being so important to the cultural future, being the thing in fact: and that pieces comparable to the great Greek-Roman-Medieval Praxiteles-Rembrandt classics are not nearly so high priced, so on down the line to more modestly priced minor pieces.
Were you asking me how I acquire library here or how to do so in NYC? If the former, I borrow books and keep them. If the latter, figure out what you want yr children to read and what will amuse you in old age and go down to 4th Avenue 2nd hand bookstores and buy big sets of Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac etc. You can buy 10 vols. of Flaubert for $5.00, and complete Balzacs (25 vols?) for under $25, etc. Also you can use the hundred or so books I left with you and I’ll send a few more. You can also buy complete Miltons, Popes, Drydens, Johnson’s, Jonsons etc. cheap on 4th Avenue, 10¢ apiece if you put in a little time—take the day off and visit every store on 4th (between 8th St. and 14th).
I’m reading Whitman, who seems to me now a great personal Colossus of American poetry—am on page 450 of 550 page complete Leaves of Grass. Also reading all I can of translations of XX Century French poetry Apollinaire, Cendrars (Blaise), Cocteau; also a little Gertrude Stein. The kick (includes Lorca) is: 1) spontaneous method of composition, 2) a long imaginative line, 3) subject: the immediate consciousness of the transcriber (or writer). A great release of imagination takes place among these writers, like jazz musicians suddenly ON and making it wildly. Little of this has been absorbed (after Whitman) into American poetry everything now is mealy-mouthed, meaningless, abstract, tight, controlled, tight-assed, scared, academic, uninventive, attitudinized, afraid to show feeling, too “Cool.” Mainly this stems from lack of constant writing, fear of revealing self (which is all a writer can do) (so that others may be themselves too, recognizing it in the writer) (which is Whitman’s great bardic kick in Song of Myself), and lack of technical experience in composition as free invention. Tight formal poetry seems to me result of basic lack of technical understanding and not subtlety, mastery control etc., which academic poets like to think of themselves as “exhibiting.” Like trained dogs. Who else is writing active? Burroughs and Kerouac. Then there are 3 minor poets around here, all influenced by us. Williams, who’s better in old age than ever. There is a group made up of Robert Creeley, Charles Olson (the best), Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn who publish their books from Majorca and run 2 little magazines, Origin and Black Mountain Review, whose work and attitude (hip, bop, free, imaginative, Zen, anarchist, sensual modern and sane) I like tho they are too tight-assed as a group from what I read and have not enough human magnanimity in their work. I’m answering your question somewhat pedantically I realize of a sudden. [ ... ]
Merry Xmas, happy anniversary belated, write when you can, see you probably sometime in spring or early summer.
Love,
Allen
Allen Ginsberg [Berkeley, CA] to Louis Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] ca. April 1956
Dear Louis:
Not written for long since I’ve been running around and busy I’m working full time at Greyhound in the city but haven’t made decent living arrangements, so I only get back to Berkeley a few times a week where all papers and letters are on desk in big mess. I stay over in city on various couches on work-days, since I’ve been back I haven’t had time to really sit down in leisure and figure out what to do about living arrangements, I almost moved back into SF tho I hate to give up this cottage, and was in fact supposed to this weekend but too many things came up and I can’t find time. I am really all up in the air.
Mainly I’m waiting for a ship or some equivalent moneymaking project since I do want to leave here and take off for Europe sometime this year. Meanwhile the Greyhound job brings in 50 a week, Seattle debts are being cleared off this month. I’m also surprisingly enough teaching one class a week at S.F. State College—State is the school that’s been promoting poetry work-shops, readings, etc. and I am now the local poet-hero so was invited to occupy the chair of guest gorilla at their writing class. I work with another regular teacher who handles all the details, registration, mimeographing of poems to be handed out and discussed etc, and I act as pro in conducting discussions. The class is about ao, half old ladies and half hip young kids who have been attracted by all the recent activity My teaching technique could shock you undoubtedly and certainly get me kicked out of anywhere else or not be countenanced, I bring in bums from North Beach and talk about marijuana and Whitman, precipitate great emotional outbreaks and howls of protest over irrational spontaneous behavior—but it does actually succeed in communicating some of the electricity & fire of poetry and cuts through the miasmic quibbling about form vs. content etc. and does this phrase “work” and is that line “successful” and are all those “p & f” sounds too intense, etc. The woman who runs this program is a Prof. Ruth Witt-Diamant who has dug my work—there appears to be, according to Rexroth, a semi major renaissance around the west coast due to Jack and my presence—and Rexroth’s wife said he’d been waiting all his life hoping for a situation like this to develop. The thing I do in class is get them personally involved in what they’re writing and lambaste anything which sounds at all like they’re writing “literature” and try to get them to actually express secret life in whatever form it comes out. I practically take off my clothes in class myself to do it. The students all dig it and understand and the class is now grown weekly to where it’s too big to handle, starting with 8 and ending with 25.
W C. Williams read Howl and liked it and wrote an introduction for the book; and meanwhile there is the possibility of expanding and making a whole book of poems. We put on another reading in a theatre here in Berkeley I read some other poems, Whitman, The Sunflower, and a new poem called America —a sort of surrealist anarchist tract—all of which came off very well, so the publisher is now interested in a book full of representative work not just the one poem. The reading was pretty great, we had traveling photographers, who appeared on the scene from Vancouver to photograph it, a couple of amateur electronics experts who appeared with tape machines to record, request from State college for a complete recording for the night, requests for copies of the recordings, even finally organizations of bop musicians who want to write music and give big west coast traveling tours of Howl as a sort of Jazz Mass, recorded for a west coast company called Fantasy records that issues a lot of national bop, etc. No kidding. You have no idea what a storm of lunatic-fringe activity I have stirred up. On top of that the local poets, good and bad, have caught up and there are now three groups of people putting on readings every other week, there’s one every weekend, all sorts of people—this week Eberhart (Richard) arrived in town for readings at State, there is a party for him tonite, I was invited to give a private reading, refused (sheer temperament), and so the recordings will be played. Tomorrow night Rexroth invited me over to meet a group of jazz musicians and discuss the possibility of making some form of jazz-poetry combo. There is also another group of musicians, the leader of which used to arrange for Stan Kenton who wants to record with me. Finally I was asked to write an article which I haven’t gotten around to do for Black Mountain Review, & also contribute to 2 literary magazines starting here. Bob LaVigne, a painter whose work I’ve been buying and digging, has been putting up wild line drawings to plaster the walls of the readings and painting fantastic 7 foot posters d la Lautrec. Really a charming scene. My big problem now is not having enough time to do all I could, working at Greyhound and not having moved out of Berkeley so I get little time for actual writing anymore—it will be a relief to get out from under and away on a ship or up to Alaska possibly on a fishing industry job.
Rexroth’s house—Friday evenings, open house, 2 weeks ago Malcolm Cowley, I got drunk and made a big inflammatory speech denouncing him for publishing Donald Hall as a commercial snot and neglecting & delaying Kerouac, a funny scene, no blood spilled; last weekend [Richard] Eberhart there, a long non drunken recollection of a party we’d met at in NY 5 years ago, he remembered the conversation in detail, I’d just got out of hospital and was hung-up on the religious experience in the Groundhog poem.
English publishers won’t handle Howl, that is English Printers (Villiers) and so there is now difficulty in getting it through unexpurgated. I revised it and it is now worse than it ever was, too. We’re now investigating Mexico, if necessary will spend extra cost and have it done here tho. Civil Liberties Union here was consulted and said they’d defend it if it gets into trouble, which I almost hope it does. I am almost ready to tackle the U.S. government out of sheer self delight. There is really a great stupid conspiracy of unconscious negative inertia to keep people from “expressing” themselves. I was reading Henry Miller’s banned book Tropic of Cancer, which actually is a great classic—I never heard of it at Columbia with anything but deprecatory dismissal comments—he and Genet are such frank hip writers that the open expression of their perceptions and real beliefs are a threat to society The wonder is that literature does have such power. [...]
Allen
[The following is Ginsberg’s most famous letter, written to poet and critic Richard Eberhart, in which Allen took agood deal of time to explain the construction of Howl.]
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Richard Eberhart [New York, NY] May 18, 1956
Dear Mr. Eberhart:
Kenneth Rexroth tells me you are writing an article on S.E poetry and asked for a copy of my manuscript. I’ll send it.
It occurred to me with alarm how really horrible generalizations might be if they are off-the-point as in newspapers.
I sat listening sans objection in the car while you told me what you’d said in Berkeley I was flattered and egotistically hypnotized by the idea of recognition but really didn’t agree with your evaluation of my own poetry. Before you say anything in the Times let me have my say 1) The general “problem” is positive and negative “values.” “You don’t tell me how to live,” “you deal with the negative or horrible well but have no positive program” etc.
This is as absurd as it sounds.
It would be impossible to write a powerful emotional poem without a firm grasp on “value” not as an intellectual ideal but as an emotional reality
You heard or saw Howl as a negative howl of protest.
The title notwithstanding, the poem itself is an act of sympathy not rejection. In it I am leaping out of a preconceived notion of social “values,” following my own heart’s instincts—allowing myself to follow my own heart’s instincts, overturning any notion of propriety, moral “value,” superficial “maturity,” Trilling-esque sense of “civilization,” and exposing my true feelings —of sympathy and identification with the rejected, mystical, individual even “mad.”
I am saying that what seems “mad” in America is our expression of natural ecstasy (as in Crane, Whitman) which suppressed, finds no social form organization background frame of reference or rapport or validation from the outside and so the “patient” gets confused thinks he is mad and really goes off rocker. I am paying homage to mystical mysteries in the forms in which they actually occur here in the U.S. in our environment.
I have taken a leap of detachment from the artificial preoccupations and preconceptions of what is acceptable and normal and given my yea to the specific type of madness listed in the Who section.
The leap in the imagination—it is safe to do in a poem.
A leap to actual living sanctity is not impossible, but requires more time for me.
I used to think I was mad to want to be a saint, but now what have I got to fear? People’s opinions? Loss of a teaching job ? I am living outside this context. I make my own sanctity. How else? Suffering and humility are forced on my otherwise wild ego by lugging baggage in Greyhound.
I started as a fair-haired boy in academic Columbia.
I have discovered a great deal of my own true nature and that individuality which is a value, the only social value that there can be in the Blake-worlds. I see it as a “social value.”
I have told you how to live if I have wakened any emotion of compassion and realization of the beauty of souls in America, thru the poem.
What other value could a poem have—now, historically maybe?
I have released and confessed and communicated clearly my true feelings tho it might involve at first a painful leap of exhibition and fear that I would be rejected.
This is a value, an actual fact, not a mental formulation of some second-rate sociological-moral ideal which is meaningless and academic in the poetry of H-, etc.
Howl is the first discovery as far as communication of feeling and truth, that I made. It begins with a catalogue sympathetically and humanely describing excesses of feeling and idealization.
Moloch is the vision of the mechanical feelingless inhuman world we live in and accept—and the key line finally is “Moloch whom I abandon.”
It ends with a litany of active acceptance of the suffering of soul of C. Solomon, saying in effect I am still your amigo tho you are in trouble and think yourself in a void, and the final strophe states the terms of the communication
“oh starry spangled shock of Mercy”
and mercy is a real thing and if that is not a value I don’t know what is.
How mercy gets to exist where it comes from perhaps can be seen from the inner evidence and images of the poem—an act of self-realization, self acceptance and the consequent and inevitable relaxation of protective anxiety and self hood and the ability to see and love others in themselves as angels without stupid mental self deceiving moral categories selecting who it is safe to sympathize with and who is not safe.
See Dostoyevsky and Whitman.
This process is carried to a crystal form in the Sunflower Sutra which is a “dramatic” context for these thoughts.
“Unholy battered old thing 0 sunflower 0 my soul
I LOVED you then.”
The effect is to release self and audience from a false and self-denying self deprecating image of ourselves which makes us feel like smelly shits and not the angels which we most deeply are.
The vision we have of people and things outside us is obviously (see Freud) a reflection of our relation to our self.
It is perhaps possible to forgive another and love another only after you forgive and love yourself.
This is why Whitman is crucial in development of American psyche. He accepted himself and from that flowed acceptance of all things.
The Sunflower Sutra is an emotional release and exposition of this process.
Thus I fail to see why you characterize my work as destructive or negative. Only if you are thinking an outmoded dualistic puritanical academic theory ridden world of values can you fail to see I am talking about realization of love. LOVE.
The poems are religious and I meant them to be and the effect on audience is (surprising to me at first) a validation of this. It is like “I give the primeval sign” of acceptance, as in Whitman.
The second point is technical. This point would be called in question only if you have not Faith. I mean it is beside the true point and irrelevant because the communication, the sign of communication if successfully made should begin and end by achieving the perfection of a mystical experience which you know all about.
I am also saying have faith that I am finally referring to the Real Thing and that I am trying to communicate it.
Why must you deny your senses?
But as to technique—[Ruth] Witt-Diamant said you were surprised I exhibited any interest in the “Line” etc.
What seems formless tho effective is really effective thru discovery or realization of rules and meanings of forms and experiments in them.
The “form” of the poem is an experiment. Experiment with uses of the catalogue, the ellipse, the long line, the litany, repetition, etc.
The latter parts of the first section set forth a “formal” esthetic derived in part incidentally from my master who is Cézanne.
The poem is really built like a brick shithouse.
This is the general ground plan—all an accident, organic, but quite symmetrical surprisingly. It grew (part III) out of a desire to build up rhythm using a fixed base to respond to and elongating the response still however containing it within the elastic of one breath or one big streak of thought.
As in all things a reliance on nature and spontaneity (as well as much experience writing and practicing to arrive at spontaneity which IS A CRAFT not a jerk-off mode, a craft in which near-perfection is basic too) has produced organic proportion in this case somewhat symmetrical (i.e. rationally apprehensible) proportion.
This is, however, vague generalization.
The Long Line I use came after 7 yrs. work with fixed iambic rhyme, and 4 yrs. work with Williams’ short line free form—which as you must know has its own mad rules—indefinable tho they be at present—
The long line, the prose poem, the spontaneous sketch are XX century French forms which Academic versifiers despite their continental interests (in XIX century French “formal” forms, Baudelaire) have completely ignored. Why?
This form of writing is very popular in S.A. and is after all the most interesting thing happening in France.
Whitman
Apollinaire
Lorca
Are these people credited with no technical sense by fools who by repeating the iambic mouthings of their betters or the quasi-iambic of Eliot or the completely irrational (tho beautiful) myth of “clear lucid form” in Pound—who works basically by ear anyway and there isn’t any clear mentally formulizable form in him anyway, no regular countable measure* [an error here, as Pound attempted to approximate classical quantitative measure. Allen Ginsberg, 1975] —I’m straying—people who by repeating etc., are exhibiting no technical sensitivity at all but merely adeptness at using already formulated ideas—and this is historically no time for that—or even if it were who cares, I don’t. I am interested in discovering what I do not know, in myself and in the ways of writing—an old point.
The long line—you need a good ear and an emotional ground-swell and technical and syntactical ease facility and a freedom “esprit” to deal with it and make of it anything significant. And you need something to say, i.e. clear realized feelings. Same as any free verse.
The lines are the result of long thought and experiment as to what unit constitutes one speech-breath-thought.
I have observed my mind
I have observed my speech
1) Drunk
2) Drugged
3) Sober
4) Sexy etc.
And have exercised it so I can speak freely, i.e. without self-conscious inhibited stoppings and censorships which latter factors are what destroy speech and thought rhythm.
We think and speak rhythmically all the time, each phrasing, piece of speech, metrically equivalent to what we have to say emotionally.
Given a mental release which is not mentally blocked, the breath of verbal intercourse will come with excellent rhythm, a rhythm which is perhaps unimprovable.
[Unimprovable as experiment in any case.
Each poem is an experiment
Revised as little as possible.
So (experiments) are many modern canvasses as you know. The sketch is a fine “Form.”]
W C. Williams has been observing speech rhythms for years trying to find a regular “measure”—
he’s mistaken I think.
There is no measure which will make one speech the exact length of another, one line the exact length of another.
He has therefore seized on the phrase “relative measure” in his old age.
He is right but has not realized the implications of this in the long line.
Since each wave of speech-thought needs to be measured (we speak and perhaps think in waves)—or what I speak and think I have at any rate in Howl reduced to waves of relatively equally heavy weight—and set next to one another they are in a balance O.K.
The technique of writing both prose and poetry, the technical problem of the present day, is the problem of transcription of the natural flow of the mind, the transcription of the melody of actual thought or speech.
I have leaned more toward capturing the inside-mind-thought rather than the verbalized speech. This distinction I make because most poets see the problem via Wordsworth as getting nearer to actual speech, verbal speech.
I have noticed that the unspoken visual-verbal flow inside the mind has great rhythm and have approached the problem of strophe, line and stanza and measure by listening and transcribing (to a great extent) the coherent mental flow. Taking that for the model for form as Cézanne took Nature.
This is not surrealism—they made up an artificial literary imitation.
I transcribe from my ordinary thoughts—waiting for extra exciting or mystical moments or near mystical moments to transcribe.
This brings up problems of image, and transcription of mental flow gives helpful knowledge because we think in sort of surrealist (juxtaposed images) or haiku-like form.
A haiku as the 1910-20’s imagists did not know, consists of 2 visual (or otherwise) images stripped down and juxtaposed—the charge of electricity created by these 2 poles being greater when there is a greater distance between them—as in Yeats’ phrase “murderous innocence of the sea”—2 opposite poles reconciled in a flash of recognition.
The mind in its flow creates such fantastic ellipses thus the key phrase of method in Howl is “Hydrogen Jukebox” which tho quite senseless makes in context clear sense.
Throughout the poem you will see traces of transcription, at its best see the last line of Sunflower Sutra, “mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tin-can evening sitdown vision.”
This is a curious but really quite logical development of Pound-Fenelossa-Chinese Written Character-imagist W C. Williams’ practice.
I don’t see the metrics or metaphors as revolution, rather as logical development, given my own interests, experiences, etc. and time.
This (explanation) is all too literary as essentially my purpose has been to say what I actually feel, (not what I want to feel or think I should feel or fit my feelings into a fake “Tradition” which is a process really not a fixed set of values and practices anyway—so anybody who wants to hang on to traditional metrics and values will wind up stultified and self-deceived anyway despite all the sincerity in the world). Everybody thinks they should learn academically from “experience” and have their souls put down and destroyed and this has been raised to the status of “value” but to me it seems just the usual old fake death, much under Professor T-, whom I love, but who is a poor mental fanatic after all and not a free soul—I’m straying.
2) The poetry situation in S.F.
The last wave was led by Robert Duncan, highly over-literary but basic recognition of the spontaneous free-form experiment. He left for Mallorca and contacted Robert Creeley, editor of Black Mountain Review, they became friends and Duncan who dug Williams, Stein, etc. especially the Black Mountain influence of Charles Olson who is the head peer of the East Coast bohemian hipster-authors post Pound. Olson’s Death of Europe in Origin last year (about a suicide German boy)—“oh that the Earth / had to be given / to you / this way.” is the first of his poems I’ve been able to read but it is a great break-through of feeling and a great modern poem I think.
Creeley his boy came here [San Francisco] last month and made contact with us—and next issue of
Black Mountain Review will carry me, Whalen and:
I) William S. Burroughs, a novelist friend of mine in Tangier. Great Man.
2) Gary Snyder, a Zen Buddhist poet and Chinese scholar 25 years old who leaves next week for further poetry study in a Zen monastery in Kyoto.
3) Jack Kerouac, who is out here and is the Colossus unknown of U.S. Prose who taught me to write and has written more and better than anybody of my generation that I’ve ever heard of. Kerouac you may have heard of but any review of the situation here would be ultimately historically meaningless without him since he is the unmistakable fertile prolific Shakespearean genius—lives in a shack in Mill Valley with Gary Snyder. Cowley (Malcolm) is trying to peddle him in N.YC. now* [Cowley as editor at Viking was having difficulty persuading the management to publish On the Road. Allen Ginsberg, 1975] and can give you info. Kerouac invented and initiated my practice of speech-flow prosody.
I recount the above since anything you write will be irrelevant if you don’t dig especially Kerouac—no shit, get info from Kenneth [Rexroth] or Louise Bogan who met him if you don’t take my word.
The W S. Burroughs above mentioned was Kerouac’s and my mentor 1943-1950.
I have written this in the Greyhound between loading busses and will send it on uncensored.
I’ve said nothing about the extraordinary influence of Bop music on rhythm and drugs on the observation of rhythm and mental processes—not enough time and out of paper.
Yours,
Allen Ginsberg
Summary
I. Values
I)
Howl is an “affirmation” of individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity, etc. part I deals sympathetically with individual cases. Part II describes and rejects the Moloch of society which confounds and suppresses individual experience and forces the individual to consider himself mad if he does not reject his own deepest senses. Part III is an expression of sympathy and identification with C. S. [Carl Solomon] who is in the madhouse—saying that his madness basically is rebellion against Moloch and I am with him, and extending my hand in union. This is an affirmative act of mercy and compassion, which are the basic emotions of the poem. The criticism of society is that “Society” is merciless. The alternative is private, individual acts of mercy. The poem is one such. It is therefore clearly and consciously built on a
liberation of basic human virtues.
To call it work of nihilistic rebellion would be to mistake it completely. Its force comes from positive “religious” belief and experience. It offers no “constructive” program in sociological terms—no poem could. It does offer a constructive human value—basically the experience—of the enlightenment of mystical experience—without which no society can long exist.
2
) Supermarket in California deals with Walt Whitman, Why?
He was the first great American poet to take action in recognizing his individuality, forgiving and accepting Him Self, and automatically extending that recognition and acceptance to all—and defining his Democracy as that. He was unique and lonely in his glory—the truth of his feelings—without which no society can long exist. Without this truth there is only the impersonal Moloch and self-hatred of others.
Without self-acceptance there can be no acceptance of other souls.
3)
Sunflower Sutra is crystallized “dramatic” moment of self-acceptance in modern terms.
“Unholy battered old thing, O sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!”
The realization of holy self-love is a rare “affirmative” value and cannot fail to have constructive influence in “Telling you (R.E.) [Richard Eberhart] how to live.”
4) America is an unsystematic and rather gay exposition of my own private feelings contrary to the official dogmas, but really rather universal as far as private opinions about what I mention. It says—“I am thus and so I have a right to do so, and I’m saying it out loud for all to hear.”
II. Technique
a. These long lines or Strophes as I call them came spontaneously as a result of the kind of feelings I was trying to put down, and came as a surprise solution to a metrical problem that preoccupied me for a decade.
I have considerable experience writing both rhymed iambics and short line post-WCW [William Carlos Williams] free verse.
Howl’s 3 parts consist of 3 different approaches to the use of the long line (longer than Whitman’s, more French).
1. Repetition of the fixed base “Who” for a catalogue.
a. building up consecutive rhythm from strophe to strophe.
b. abandoning of fixed base “who” in certain lines but carrying weight and rhythm of strophic form continuously forward.
2. . Break up of strophe into pieces within the strophe, thus having the strophe become a new usable form of stanza—Repetition of fixed base “Moloch” to provide cement for continuity. Supermarket uses strophe stanza and abandons need for fixed base. I was experimenting with the form.
3. . Use of a fixed base, “I’m with you in Rockland,” with a reply in which the strophe becomes a longer and longer streak of speech, in order to build up a relatively equal nonetheless free and variable structure. Each reply strophe is longer than the previous I have measured by ear and speech-breath, there being no other measure for such a thing. Each strophe consists of a set of phrases that can be spoken in one breath and each carries relatively equal rhetorical weight. Penultimate strophe is an exception and was meant to be—a series of cries—“O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy O victory etc.” You will not fail to observe that the cries are all in definite rhythm.
The technical problem raised and partially solved is the break-through begun by Whitman but never carried forward, from both iambic stultification and literary automatism, and unrhythmical shortline verse, which does not yet offer any kind of base cyclical flow for the build up of a powerful rhythm. The long line seems for the moment to free speech for emotional expression and give it a measure to work with. I hope to experiment with short-line free verse with what I have learned from exercise in long.
b. Imagery—is a result of the kind of line and the kind of emotions and the kind of speech-and-interior flow-of-the-mind transcription I am doing—the imagery often consists of 1920s WC.W [Williams] imagistically observed detail collapsed together by interior associative logic—i.e., “hydrogen jukebox,” Apollinaire, Whitman, Lorca. But not automatic surrealism. Knowledge of Haiku and ellipse is crucial.
Allen Ginsberg [USNS Sgt.Jack J. Pendleton, Wainwright, Alaska] to Robert LaVigne [San Francisco, CA] August 3, 1956
Dear Bob:
Settled down in trip more, now up at a place in Arctic Circle called Wainwright, Alaska—so far no ice, snow, icebergs, aurora, whales, dolphins, seals, fish—nothing but grey sea and occasional bright day, and day which truly does last all night. The light if you’re interested of these northern nights has a kind of deadbluish-grey immanence, as if not out of sun (usually hidden behind solid cover of clouds also dead grey color past midnight) but lunar reflected out of the water. But it is enough to think it’s day by.
Reading mostly pious works, the lives of the Saints and the Bible, tho small comfort all that since I feel my own egotism and irresolution more painfully for the striking though doctrinally confusing examples set up in my imagination by St. Francis (have 2 different biographies aboard). Death of my mother
31 has brought me more close to understanding inevitability of death feeling that already I see a part of me my childhood in the grave, a piece of my own life gone and the rest surely to go, and rereading my own writings the skimpiness and hollowness of most of that. Enclosed a pamphlet of Mexican poem I mimeographed last weekend. Really I feel miserable the isolation not so much as the continual sexual attrition and voluptuousness of my night dreams and the broad daylight out of jointedness of it when I dress and come to breakfast with the men I dream of, making me feel as if life is wasted in Kafkian sexual dreams, or else the broad daylight is wasted in fear of homosexual martyrdom, which it would be if I began acting like I feel: added to that the continual ignoring of this whole problem in the Bible and Saints except for admonition to disregard and suppress entirely all objects of the sense and put yr. love to the fear of the lord, whoever or whatever that is, tho It certainly exists in some form I am no longer able to guess about. Anyway the dumps.
Send me a pretty picture envelope size you can send without folding for me to tack up on my bunk and contemplate.
Not allowed off ship, tho we’ve been anchored here for several days half a mile off shore where thru field glasses I can see a village on a cliff of 70 houses ramshackle, Eskimos live there without measles or colds and that’s why we can’t visit. Northern latitudes look flat and the land of Alaska a pencil line on the edge of horizon from where we are, and the further Northward stretches up another thousand miles to the pole in the daylite streaked with clouds.
What’s happening in SF? I wrote Ferlinghetti to see if a drawing could be arranged with you for my book but I guess it’s too late, I don’t know. Maybe check with him if he hasn’t contacted you. Send me a gossipy letter.
Love,
Allen
Allen Ginsberg [USNS Sgt. Jack J. Pendleton, Alaska] to Rebecca Ginsberg [Newark, NJ] August II, 1956
Dear Buba [Allen’s grandmother]:
I am sorry not to have written you earlier. I have been traveling and in strange places but I have thought of you often, as I know you have thought of me: and I love you for that, and have not forgotten.
Naomi’s death made me remember my own generation, and how it must pass. She wrote me to marry, before she died, as you have spoken. I take that to heart, but my path is too far from home yet and will be a while more, while it is still dark. This to your heart. But there is time left me for many summers of grass on earth, I am not impatient.
I am on the sea north of Alaska 1000 miles from the Pole. The sun is up all night, and ice flows by on the edge of the ocean day after day. I spend my evenings reading through the books of the Old Testament—and from Genesis I have read to Samuel and the story of David who danced naked before the Ark. I am sorry I am not able to talk with you about your memory of the family, time, and the Jews.
I hear that Clara [Allen’s aunt] is getting married—give her my love and say I will see her this year; and will see you too for I will return East before the end of the year.
I will go to Europe after awhile and hope to go to visit Russia. If you know of any of our family there please try to find out where they are, I would like to visit them, and see their faces. Travel is now permitted there by both countries —it may not be so forever, and train fare costs little, and I can live like a hermit, so I see no reason not to try a pilgrimage to Pinsk and Vitebsk. The captain of this boat, by the way, is an old White Russian.
San Francisco and the West Coast has been a good place for me—I have found money easy to make, and so have become less concerned with having it, and my needs are small, so I have had freedom to study and look at the sun and laugh at the summer grass.
Give my love to the whole family, send me your blessings, and I will see you soon.
As ever, love
Allen
[Once back in San Francisco, Ginsberg learned that Carolyn Kizer had been asked to write an article on the new literary scene just beginning to unfold in San Francisco.]
Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Carolyn Kizer [?] September 10, 1956
Dear Carolyn Kiser: [sic: Kizer]
Greetings once again. Rumors you are doing an article for Nation on San Francisco Poetry. This is absolutely absurd, how can you know all the essential details? Most of the poetry here is illustrious unknown. Therefore this letter. IF you are doing an article allow me to intrude. Get the facts straight. Eberhart wrote good article, since it was inclusive, in last Sunday Times NY. But not being on or of scene nor being acquainted with material how could he do anything but vague journalism, and you must realize that newspapers get all the facts screwed up anyway even say murder stories, so how can anything straightforward informed and understanding be wrote about so cockily and silly a thing as poetry; like love affairs—imagine a review of the season’s love affairs. Well it must not be in condescending tone, that’s first paramount. Must be simple without attitudes, and if possible without aesthetic bullshit about manners and form. Above all no yelling about revolt or immature kicking against form by ignorances. We is not ignoramuses. But I am writing this not essentially to argue (we’ve already argued and I’m sick of it) (too much basic understanding of the basic words we argued about like the word “form” by which you mean one thing and I, or we, if there is a we, which there really isn’t, mean another). Now to some pertinent facts and read these please as they are really so.
The greatest writer in San Francisco who has unquestionably lifted the whole scene to joy is unknown but will not be so long, his name is Jack Kerouac and he is a novelist and poet. He just returned to town an hour ago from spending the summer in Desolation Peak, Baker National Forest, as a fire-watcher. Author of a number of books mentioned in my dedication to Howl. Cowley is diddling with a long manuscript of his and Grove Press will now probably if all goes well carry out an offer to print everything of his in chronological order. A great genius of method of spontaneous writing—a style like mixture of Melville and Celine—a story of his “The Mexican Girl” in Paris Review earlier this year and under pseudonym of Jean Luis a story “Jazz of the Beat Generation” in New World Writing 8 I think. He is a Buddhist. Generally the method is as in Buddhist Zen Archery or Koan Response, long continued practice at spontaneous exactness of expression requiring years of 10-16 hours a day practicing uninterrupted transcription of the droppings of the mind upon a page—until form, deep form, begins to appear, emerge out of the sea. Requires native genius to do however and emerge as anything but conscious chatter. Now Jack is actually the great seminal spirit here, who transformed my earlier work, and gave me what power I have. This same influence at work in last hectic productive year on Gary Snyder, and also on Philip Whalen. Snyder’s work you know, at least heard some of tho I don’t think you paid attention. There is also, from Reed, Philip Whalen, mentioned by Eberhart as one of the “bookless” poets. [Stanley] Kunitz saw him and his work here. Also under Jack’s debt.
A poet whom Jack and I dug, a young Wop ex-jail kid with angelic mind, Gregory Corso, who learned perhaps a little from us of self acceptance and how to blow natural, was in Harvard, bumming around Cambridge, they put a play of his at poets theatre and collected money to put out an early book poems of his there. I enclose that book. Note the free-swinging strange verbal style. It of course looks goofy and uneducated to you but you must also dig what he has, as well as what you think that he doesn’t have. Well he just hit town a few weeks ago to see me and Jack with a pile of new manuscript and City Lights man dug him immediately, so did Ruth Witt-Diamant and everybody around, so he will give reading here next month, and City Lights is getting a book out for him, perhaps six months will take for that. He is of the same ground and style, you’ll have to see for yourself how it follows a method and differs from say a random [Kenneth] Patchen type blathering. You must not misunderstand this all as pure ignorant mental bohemianism else you miss the gist and don’t grasp the existence of a method, which I keep saying requires considerable mental discipline and above all as with any skill extensive free practical practice. For clearest simplest poems in Corso’s book, these two: In the Morgue and on p. 13 In the Early Morning. The elegy for or Requiem for Bird Parker (Charlie Parker the great musician I’m sure you know of him) is the most important poem in the book—read it aloud, forget the few obvious absurd or crude elements and dig the hip tone, the humor and the fine imagination. Yeh, yeh. This is his own emergent swinging style. Imaginatively swinging as the hipsters say.
I enclose Mike McClure’s book. He has his own formal delicacy, unlike Corso or me but he also possibly has undergone some affect from my Sunflower Sutra style—see particularly the poem the Greech. W C. Williams thinks the Death of the Whales, last poem is a great statement, I rather agree. He’s cooler and perhaps less magnanimous as a spirit than others but an intense married young man and what can you do with such having babies and all except hope for the best, that they don’t get dry and nasty and critical and attempt to keep an open perhaps even religious exuberance of nature. Not against criticism much, except as it reflects an unbalanced character—out of fear of own nature, criticizing self and others. Read Whitman. Any way I send you McClure. The only thing that counts is examples of energy or perfection in work, that’s what corrects, but not theoretical criticism that’s useless for improvement mostly you realize. Think of Rembrandt, and don’t be afraid to think of Beethoven and Rembrandt. No quarrels, just examples of Art. This also is classical Zen not primitive ignorance of tradition. The tradition remember is not what you are taught in school. There is a tradition however. What that is is another matter but please like I say don’t write about tradition if you are just going to write about what is taught in school, any school. No matter how charming a school.
I also enclose samples of other City Lights publications. Ferlinghetti as you know who he is, runs City Lights. The others you know already, they are not new and I have no axes to grind in that direction.
And Robert Duncan. Ever hear of him??? He has been running SF poetry, holding fort, immense intelligence and learnedness, just been to Europe, returned last week, will be asst. director of Witt-D. Poetry Center this year now, as had been before less officially. He also, with greater learning than anyone else of us, tho not so great spirit perhaps, greater classical preparation tho, been tackling for years the problem of the transcription of the droppings of the mind on the page. Some of his work in print somewhere. Contact older issues of Black Mountain Review or Origin magazine. Well he has always been the spiritual leader here, before, but Jack and I came from east, 3 years ago, and Corso, and Gary and Phil emerged from the Northwest Seattle, see, and the local woodwork while he was in Europe, without much connection with him, tho I’ve always been interested in Duncan, but all respect his great learning and his long practice of a sort of smaller can purity of approach to the blank page, his clearing of his mind of chatter, meditation, and then transcription of the endless sentences of his consciousness. So he’s back now to help complete the picture his own way.
Then Robert Creeley—ever know of him? Editor of Black Mountain Review, connected with Duncan in Mallorca, and so this summer came out here to see me, Kerouac, Rexroth, Snyder, Whalen, all became buddies, lots of drinking marijuana jazz and discussion of eastern (Black Mountain Creeley-Olson hip cool Mallarmé style) and recent western (me, Jack, blowing hot and frantic) (and romantic)—meeting of minds, he left town with huge pile of manuscripts for next edition of Black Mountain Review—an earlier intro to my work by W C. Williams, an expanded version of “America,” a poem of mine, the poems of Whalen that Eberhart mentions, a mess of Snyder’s work, some prose of Kerouac, and a short piece of explicit instructions by Kerouac, titled “Essentials of Modern Prose” showing exactly how to meditate and transcribe in dudden or Chan or Zen fashion the perpetual prose or poetry of the mind, the ordinary or elated mind, a statement of method you see, this too to be published, plus Creeley took along poems of McClure, etc. and an unknown railroad brakeman from Southern Pacific named Neal Cassady who taught me and Jack that the mind has its own flow and rhythm—this is too much for you to absorb maybe for an article if you have any intention of absorbing I hope you do anyway—but I do want to indicate the real sense of things here not some phony formal la do da about literature and groups and crap which has nothing to do with nothing.
Actually to do an article you should read Whalen’s work, and Jack’s and get a hold of Duncan and Creeley’s publications. However at least do indicate that there is a rumor or a conscious ascription of true originality by me and Whalen and Snyder and Corso and others to king Jack Kerouac.
Is it true that you are going to write an article by the way?
IF not this is all silly. But won’t do no harm and took me 10 minutes. When you are thru with the enclosed material send the Corso and McClure books to Louise Bogan c/o New Yorker Magazine, who may possibly do a review of my book, but I want her to see these, too, for her own edification. She by the way knows and digs Kerouac, I mean this to say he isn’t my myth, or an irrelevant myth, he’s central. Dig him, write of him and you have a magnanimous lovely poetical SCOOP. But I guess it don’t make much difference because from what I see of articles articles articles they’re just articles irrelevant to the creation of poetry which has nothing to do even with publications, or nothing, just God and Buddha who don’t read the newspapers, or whatever.
There I have written a letter of some length requiring attention and tried on my part. Remember I have nothing to lose or gain one way or the other by your paying attention to what I have explained here, but you do have something to gain if you trust me and will understand that I have been trying to be helpful and tried not to bug you but set forth and communicate out of the blue which wasn’t necessary for me to do, except it was ordered by angels from above, so your duty lies you believe in angels is to try accept this intervention if it seems unseemly.
Yours
Allen Ginsberg
Note also the rather clear tho light images in Ferlinghetti’s book.
[Carolyn Kizer’s article did appear and Ginsberg was quite happy with the results. He felt she made fair and balanced statements. On November 1, 1956, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published 1,000 copies of Howl and Other Poems as the fourth in the City Lights Pocket Poets series.]
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] to Lawrence Ferlinghetti [San Francisco, CA] December 7, 1956
Dear Larry:
Well, finally here in NYC. We left Gregory waiting for money order to arrive in Mexico City; it was sent the worst and slowest way possible, mail money order, several weeks ago, he was still waiting December 3. Money order from his girl so he could fly home fast, to [Randall] Jarrell.
Reading we gave in LA was the most wild ever, I disrobed, finally, been wanting to onstage for years.
Peter, Lafcadio and Jack Kerouac and I came up here together. Gregory by the way filled a whole huge Mexican notebook full of beautiful strange poems and silly pictures, writing more and better than ever. His book for you ought to be really great, individual and solid—he surprised me even by his great voluminousness and copiousness and freedom of imagination all the way down on the trip, writing poems all over everywhere in bus stops and restaurants. His style developing looser and more far out toward an imaginative wop surrealism. He’s as completely tough and original now as anyone I can think of. I was really kind of aghast and amazed how fertile and curious everything he wrote seemed at the moment.
Well anyway, this letter from Laughlin.
32 Open all letters you think necessary, personal or not, I don’t care. I hope to give him something new, rather than reprint,
Howl. So the reprint of 1500
Howls is safe. Grove Press has an
Evergreen Review upcoming and they asked for reprint of
Howl too, but I’ll give them other material. Maybe later on if there’s still demand, in a year or so, I don’t know. Why 1500 copies?? Can you sell them? There are a number in the 8th St. Bookshop, buried under Rexroth’s title, but nobody I know in the Village has seen or bought it. So I don’t imagine you’ll dispose of many in the Village. Need some kind of advertising or distribution but that’s out of the question.
Send me please the remaining 25 copies (as per 1000 reprint) due me, I can use them here now. I keep giving them away. If any more are due me since the reprint is 1500 send them too, to bring to Europe. Or do you have any now, and are you waiting for reprint to arrive? If have few send me 5 at least if you have them.
Spent a long time talking with Williams yesterday, he heard little about the SF scene and was interested. I read him some Gregory which he liked.
Denise Levertov we stopped and saw, she was nice to us, we liked her a lot. I was surprised how much a good Joe she was. What ads in Nation? That is, what dates for Nation and intro?
Just spoke to Laughlin, told him to reprint Sunflower [Sutra], if he wanted, and will send him some new poems. I guess that would not harm book, might do it some good in fact.
Levertov is a good poetess, certainly, I read a lot of her work there. Regards, I’ll write a clearer letter later.
Allen
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] to Robert Creeley [Albuquerque, NM] December 11, 1956
Dear Robert:
Sorry we didn’t get to New Mexico—I left S.F. a month ½ ago with Peter, Lafcadio his brother and Gregory, who had no money, and we were worried about time and money. Passed thru LA with Gregory, alone, preceding Orlovsky brothers, to give reading for Anaïs Nin, [Stuart] Perkoff, silly Lawrence Lipton and 70 other assorted strangers from Coastlines magazine and friends of Lip and Nin. Someone heckled Gregory so I drunkenly screamed take off your clothes and be naked, which then realizing what I was saying I went and did myself, to my great surprise. They made me put them back on before reading Howl, which I read with great wildness and lovely abandon so the night turned out fine. We went straight to Mexicali then, to take desert all night buses with wetbacks and Corso complaining and fighting with Lafcadio over who sits near the window. This saved us 20$$ U.S. cost bus fares to El Paso or other further bordertown, Albuquerque was out of reach—Neal was originally supposed to drive us, but he skinned the sole off his foot in a RR accident a few days before departure and I loaned him some money for family, so we were strapped and since traveling with so many it made immediate dive for border necessary. Nonetheless I flew over Albuquerque by ghostplane and saw you struggling drunkenly in the moonlight out of car which ran out of gas in desert and watched you alas rip your leg on barbed wire crawling with friend to the highway. He (I no remember his name) told me about it. We spent a drunk night arguing with him about Peter’s soul, argument d la Black Mount. In the morning we watched dawn come up over Chinatown and Peter picked up a huge board and killed a cat which was writhing and gasping in painful death throes, a kitten, on the pale dawn sidewalk.
We went to Guadalajara and visited Denise Levertov for several days, and liked her. Her husband read halting prose to us—so embarrassed to read he kept stopping to tell involved complete story of the novel. He’s very simpatico. Gregory read his poetry to her, she kept laughing happily at it, we walked thru markets together and held hands and watched mad longhaired Mexicans selling cure-all liquids for blindness amid church rubble.
Found Jack in Mexico City and woke him up and spent two weeks drunk, high often (all except me I can’t stand it anymore) (tho the one great time we all got high on top of Pyramid of the Sun and stared at the sky and the whole shining valley of Mexico and ring of mountains and intelligent little Indian boys climbing all the way up to us to sell Aztec images—Gregory surpassing the scene by trading his Harvard belt for all they had). Then all rode by car north 5 days thru great mountains and valleys and deserts and half of U.S. to New York and arrived last week. Viking printing Jack, as well as Grove in Evergreen Review, a novelette called Subterraneans. I saw W C. Williams for long 3 hour talk last week and will return to read him Jack, Philip and Corso and Snyder and Lorca’s ode to Walt Whitman—he says he don’t remember it. He asked about you, said it was alright to use those sketches I sent you in BMR asked also how you read, wanted a description, I tried imitating the terminal breathgulp, and articulation of separate words. Is Snyder’s manuscript back with Whalen yet? I want to read him some, and also have opportunity of placing chunks of it with Grove Evergreen Review and also Laughlin. If you need any agenting (poetry) done send me manuscript and I’ll pass them along too. Send me some poems to read anyway. I’ve written a little but nothing revised and typed so later. [ ... ]
Love as ever
Allen
[Ginsberg was always eager to meet other poets whether famous or obscure. This is a good example of his attempt to visit one of America’s most famous poets.]
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] to e. e. cummings [New York, NY] December 20, 1956
Dear Mr. Cummings:
Came to your door, you were out, am writing, will be in NY for a month, then leave for Europe with 2 other poets, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso. Came from San Francisco where we held big crazy drunken poetry readings. I sent you my book, Howl, from there, to 8 Patchin Place, did you get it, did you read it? Have manuscript of Corso, Kerouac, Snyder (25 year old Zen hip young cocksman who lives, with a sweet mind, in Kyoto monastery translating the Zen Lunatic poets) and other SF recent poets, to read to you, a few poems, write me a postcard, I’d like to come by.
Sincerely,
Allen Ginsberg
[P.S.] Rexroth gave me your address, said you never read your mail anyway so that’s why I knocked on door before.
[As they had feared, U.S. customs officials seized the second printing of Howl as it was coming into the country from the British printer. Ginsberg was visiting Burroughs in North Africa at the time and wrote to his publisher and friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.]
Allen Ginsberg [Tangier, Morocco] to Lawrence Ferlinghetti [San Francisco, CA] April 3, 1957
Dear Larry:
Received your letter of March 27 and was surprised by news of Customs seizure. [ ... ] Offhand I don’t know what to say about MacPhee.
33 I don’t know what the laws are and what rights I got. Is it possible to get them in at New York P.O. and have them shipped on to you under other label or address? Transshipped from NY that is? Is it also possible to have any copies sent to me here from England? I suppose the publicity will be good I suppose—I have been here with Jack, Peter and Bill Burroughs all hung-up on private life and Bill’s mad personality and writings and on digging the Arab quarter and taking majoun (hashish candy) and opium and drinking hot sweet delicious mint tea in Rembrandt dark cafés and long walks in lucid Mediterranean coast green grassy brilliant light North Africa that I haven’t written any letters (this is the second in 2 weeks) or thought much about anything. I’ll write to Grove to Don Allen and let him know, and he’ll tell the lady from Time-Life. If you can mimeograph a letter and get some kind of statement from W C. Williams, [Louise] Bogan, [Richard] Eberhart and send it around to magazines might get some publicity that way. Also let Harvey Breit at
NY Times know for sure definitely—he’d probably run a story maybe. My brother is a lawyer and has recently done some research on the subject, I’ll write him to get in touch with you and provide any legal aid—if any is useful from him in New York. I guess this puts you up shits creek financially. I didn’t think it would really happen. I didn’t know it was costing you 200$ for reprint, I thought it was $80.00 each extra thousand. Sorry I am not there, we might talk and figure up some way for a U.S. edition, I guess that would be expensive tho. Be sure let the
Life people in SF know about situation, they might include it in story. The woman in NY is Rosalind Constable c/o Time-Life, Rockefeller Center. She is very simpatico and would immediately call it to attention of Peter Bunzell who is (I heard) writing up the story for Life in NY. Send story too to Village Voice, they’ve been digging the scene. By the way I heard there was a lukewarm review in
Partisan Review, could you send it to me? Might let them know, too, as they took a poem of mine for later. I guess the best way publicity wise is prepare some sort of outraged and idiotic but dignified statement, quoting the Customs man, and Eberhart’s article and Williams, and Nation review, mimeograph it up and send it out as a sort of manifesto publishable by magazines and/or news release. Send one to Lu Carr at United Press, too. If this is worthwhile. Also write, maybe, [Randall] Jarrell, at Library of Congress and see if you can get his official intercession. I imagine these Customs people have to obey orders of their superiors; and that superiors in Washington, D.C., might be informed and requested to intercede by some official in Library of Congress. Maybe I’ll write my congressmen—is there a friendly congressman in SF? This might be more rapid than a lawsuit. Copyright it under City Lights name—only thing is, if you ever make your money back and make some profit from all your trouble, and we go into a 4th or 17th edition, we divvy the loot. I don’t think Grove book will knock out sales. They’ll probably carry note about the full book. Send me clippings of reviews—I haven’t got anything besides the
Nation, if anything comes through; also any further news of the Cellar
34 etc. sounds charming. Everybody must be having a ball. How’s Duncan. Regards to DuPeru, etc.
Ark III out yet? Send one? I must say am more depressed than pleased, disgusted than pleased, about Customs shot, amusing as it is—the world is such a bottomless hole of boredom and poverty and paranoiac politics and diseased rags here
Howl seems like a drop in the bucket-void and literary furor illusory—seems like it’s happening in otherland—outside me, nothing to do with me or anything. Jack has a room I move into next week, full of light on a hill a few blocks above the beach from whence I’m writing now, can look over the veranda redstone tile, huge patio, over the harbor, over the bay, across the very sunlit straights and see the blue coast of Spain and ancient parapets of Europe I haven’t been to yet, Gibraltar small and faraway but there in brilliant blue water, and a huge clear solid cloudless blue sky—I never saw such serene light as this, big classical Mediterranean beauty-light over a small world. I’ll write Senor MacPhee myself, ask him to let my copies go, big serious poignant sad letter.
Write me and I’ll answer, let me know how things go, if there’s anything you want me to do let me know and send along any clippings if you can. These aerogrammes are only 10¢ postage if there are no enclosures.
Thank Kenneth [Rexroth] for efforts and say I hope he enjoys the scene—it is pretty funny, almost a set-up, I imagine they can’t bug us forever, and will have to give in. Let me know what the law is.
Rock and Roll on all the jukeboxes here, just had a rock and roll riot at the moviehouse here a few weeks ago, and in fact before I left NY me and Peter picked up on the historic stageshow at the Paramount. I brought a few Little Richard and Fats Domino records here in fact.
Only interesting person here besides Burroughs is Jane Bowles whom I have only met with once.
As ever,
Allen Grebsnig
Allen Ginsberg [Tangier, Morocco] to Robert LaVigne [Spokane, WA] June 8, 1957
Dear Bob:
Received letters, and drawings. The brushwork with the flower I thought beautiful and in some ways better than the others, though the head with moon and star in eye looks like the product of much previous doodling and thought. I like the poetic tricks in the faces (do you know Cocteau’s double faces of Marais?) but I don’t like the faces themselves—though that has nothing to do with the line—I guess you mean the faces to be somewhat imaginary sylphlike stylizations but I showed one to Burroughs and his immediate comment reflected my own earlier unspoken noticing—“Gawd,” he said “who the fuck is that effeminate asshole (the imaginary poet you drew)—it looks like some Greenwich Village fairy xmas postcard!” The actual postcard Orpheus was supposed to [be] funny, but was the chap with the moon in mouth supposed to be so faint (washed out looking?). All these unobtainable agricultural beauties must be driving your sex-mythologized imagination off its rocker. Are there no tough angels in Spokane? Well soon I will be seeing El Greco’s stylized fairy Christs in Toledo so I’ve no right to complain.
There is a painter here Francis Bacon, I must have mentioned, just met him the last few weeks, he’s very good, I’d seen a few (only 3) pictures by him in NY and SF—in Museum of Modern Art, what looks like gorilla in black tuxedo with his head chopped off over the mouth sitting under a deathly black umbrella, with a bunch of Rembrandt butcher cadaver cows hanging around him. He’s friend of Bowles and we see him every other day on street and stop for coffee or tour bars. Very strange nature, looks like 35 or so, rather fat boy but tough, but he’s actually 47 with his English sneakers and levis and curly red hair —rather spoiled tragic face like Thomas, D. [Dylan]—and quite a sport. A good cook and has worked around, didn’t start painting till thirty and now the best painter in England I think, and says his reputation is a lot of chic shit and will decline and he don’t give a shit, he’s a gambler, won 4000$ at Monte Carlo, spent it all in a summer ten years ago, villa, autos, champagne, likes to be whipped and had six year affair with Peter Lacey an ex-RAF cocktail pianist in a large western empty chic bar here—anyway a very serious painter, has a funny approach. Doesn’t dig abstraction, thinks DeKooning the great man in U.S. for his attempt to plant an image on the canvas busting thru abstract smash of paint—his approach to painting is gamblers, says he is waiting for some way to paint a picture of someone, but not representation, psychic representation, the eye and a nose and the mouth, all formed somehow on the canvas, by accident, then the trap shuts on him, and by an accident of sudden brushstroke inspiration and slip of arm the eye takes on inconceivable painterly and poetic magic—not poetry he’s after, but some dangerous game with the canvas where by patience and long work and wild splashing of canvas painting a face all of a sudden some spontaneous brushstroke gesture will make it, a great image... and is so hung up on the expressionists, Soutine, and Van Gogh,—in fact finished a series of seven pictures modeled on a Van Gogh, showing him walking down the road, the landscape looking upside down, Van Gogh in different ghostly slumping positions on the road with a big shadow hat. Got drunk here and hurt his arm, and so not painted here yet but will stay a year or so. Spends money like child and enjoys “gilded gutter” and is really interesting form of man—said he enjoyed, gambling, knowledge zenlike that he was making it, so in a half hour piled up winnings, and watched the spirit leave him and exhilarated equally by reverse of fortune and watching the whole pile fade and flow back where it came from—“life is a lie.” ... Burroughs prose much the same, pure free association of visual images, a sort of dangerous bullfight with the mind, whereby he places himself in acute psychic danger of uncovering some secret which will destroy him—of course this not really exaggerated—dredging up unpublishable mad routines about talking assholes, a whole section of the book dedicated to recurrent image of the hardon and spurt come when the hanged man has his neck snapped (a physiological fact) even finally vast paranoiac theories of Agents and psychic Senders taking over the world in bureaucratic conspiracies located in Interzone, with Lee (Burroughs) the Agent and Author, the great Factualist, witnessing and killing assassins and being followed.
I got your letters and read them but haven’t time much to sit down think and answer because I am so swamped with work other than my own, cleaning up remnants of correspondence via publishing etc. and working with Bill on his manuscript and mediating between him and Peter who are somewhat antipathetic and trying to read the Koran and Melville and dig the scene here and at the same time have time to sit and think—so far very little. Every time I have free time I have the specter of letters to answer and so it takes me a long time to get around—I’m sorry if I try you by being so silent, I’m not being spooky I just am screwed up—I thought Europe would mean leisure and I’ve been hung up on backlog details since been here. Not written one good word except something like this letter and don’t know where I’m going writing.
We leave here, Peter and I, in a day, tomorrow morning, to train thru Spain, Seville, cathedrals and first Europe town, then Cordoba the great Mosque, and then the Alhambra at Grenada, then Toledo, El Grecos, then Madrid and the Prado, Bosches, and then up north to Riviera France, Marseilles and Aix en Provence Cézanne country, then to Venice—should arrive in Venice to stay with friend Ansen there in a month or less, be on the road continually till then. I’ve been sick, some kind of liver or stomach trouble on and off but that seems gone so I’m ready to travel and work on Burroughs manuscript is temporarily ended. Short letter, rare, from Corso, complaining he’s starving in Paris, he took trip to Nice, saw Miro show, saw Picasso and yelled at him in French “I’m starving I’m starving” and got in garbled conversation, was dragged away, went back thru Barcelona to Paris and waved a pistol in an existentialist cave cafe and got took to jail for drunk and let out next morn. Sounds like he’s having wild trip what? Says he finally sent his book to Ferlinghetti. IF you have drawings, one or a series, you think publishable why not send letter to Don Allen, Evergreen Review, and describe them and find out if he can use any, I told him about you but he hasn’t seen more than a few drawings, say I told you to try him, he might pay a little.
New poetry magazine from one John Wieners, Boston, should be the great one, he’s trying to draw all threads together and is good poet himself, sort of an east coast Creeley-Olson axis but more humane digs Williams and Kerouac, and Gregory. Write him subscribe if you have loot or tell him you have none and ask for free copy—MEASURE magazine.
Glad you wrote Peter he pleased with your letter—the one you wrote him seemed more intelligible and real than mine in fact. Tho you may prefer your less simple expressions.
This my last day here, it’s raining, company coming over in an hour signing off. I’ll write you from new address when I get to Venice where there are many a great Bellini too, I hear.
Love, as ever,
Allen
[When Ferlinghetti decided to have Howl and Other Poems printed in the United States, the Department of Customs dropped their case against the book. However, it wasn’t the end of the problem. On June 3, 1957, two plainclothes policemen purchased copies of Howl and a little magazine called The Miscellaneous Man. Then they arrested Ferlinghetti and the bookstore manager, Shig Murao. Both men were charged with publishing and selling obscene material.]
Allen Ginsberg [Tangier, Morocco] to Lawrence Ferlinghetti [San Francisco, CA] June 10, 1957
Dear Larry:
Received your June 4 letter today, with clipping. I guess this is more serious than the customs seizure since you can lose real money on this deal if they find you guilty. What does it look like? I guess with ACLU should be possible to beat —except this is local law—does that give police complete discretion to decide what’s obscene? If so that may make it difficult.
Presumably a matter of local politics—therefore can anything be done to call off police through politicians at City Hall thru State College thru Poetry Center thru Witt-Diamant? If it is a matter of purely interpretive local law and juvenile bureau, perhaps somebody at Berkeley and State College know somebody at City Hall that can call a halt. But arrest and formal charges have been filed already, so I guess open showdown is inevitable.
I remember your speaking of troubles with local police on Henry Miller—and not being able to beat the cops on that—is it possible also in this case? It was all funny before but could be very difficult, for you, you actually stand to risk so much, money. In any case if you get fined I’ll try to help raise loot to pay it—you’ve put yourself out financially very far already.
Had awful fantasy of being in SF and putting on big reading sponsored by State College at museum and inviting cops and ending in big riot scene. I wish I were there; there could really, we could really have a ball, and win out in the end inevitably.
There seems to be good ground for expecting to win out—but I haven’t seen the Miscellaneous Man—if you can convince them my book is “Art” will you get hooked on M.M.? I wonder if that will prove a stumbling block—you didn’t seem to think much of the M.M. story when you mentioned it sometime back. Does it make things harder or more confused with two separate issues to deal with?
Who or what is behind all this attention? It appears like Customs were burned up when they had to let go and someone must have called juvenile police from customs, and asked them to take up and carry the ball from there.
Well these are just vague ramblings, I don’t know the situation, you must have chewed it all over already.
One thing occurs to me—re Evergreen Review. They’re carrying Howl complete and are due out soon if not now. Will they get carried in SF bookstores? Will you be able to carry them (Are you still selling Howl from the store)? And if Grove can’t distribute Evergreen in SF for their special SF issue, Grove will be in a hell of a spot and the police are likely to have the whole poetry population of SF personally with all their mothers and aunts up in outraged arms. Well I guess the more the merrier. Really it’s a ridiculous mess. Have you got in touch with Grove? Or maybe they can just slip thru unnoticed and not ask for trouble. Too bad Gregory Corso is not there to make an anonymous phone call to the juvenile authorities tipping them off that Paul Elder is carrying same obscenity in Evergreen—infiltrating thru every channel—by the way is Elder selling Howl or any other store in town—and what are they doing about it—pulling their necks back in or continuing to sell? I’m really sorry I’m not there to take part in this latest development. I never thought I’d want to read Howl again but it would be a pleasure under these circumstances. It might give it a reality as “social protest” I always feared was lacking without armed bands of outraged Gestapo. Real solid prophetic lines about being dragged off the stage waving genitals and manuscript, biting detectives in the neck etc.... I wonder by the way if the communist propaganda in America will further confuse the issue, the police, the judges and even ACLU. I really had some such situation as this in mind when I put them in, sort of deliberately saying I am a communist to see what would happen ... burning bridges (not Harry) you might say. Well if they do send you to jail I’ll make haste to return to SF and wage war in person, join you in next cell. Poor Shig, after his motorcycle bust up to get busted on this kind of bum rap ... give him my thanks and apologies... I hope it was not grim. Strange to see his name in the paper.
I don’t know what to suggest, I guess you already got testimonials from WCW and Poetry, etc., judging from the article you sent me. Are local newspapers being sympathetic? I have a friend on the Oakland Tribune, named Jim Fitzpatrick, who is quite literate... might try calling him for some kind of local pressure publicity—give him a statement or something. Did Harvey Breit carry anything on the original customs seizure? He ought to be informed about this, I guess he’d write something and you might get in further angles there about what is Grove Evergreen going to do—and the fact that you’ve put out the Levertov and Ponsot and are expecting Gregory next. As far as testimonials and official types, I imagine Jarrell might be rung in and make himself useful. He don’t approve of the dirty words in my book so I understand, but he is Poetry Consultant at Library of Congress and gets paid for it and he has visited your store and he did dig it as cultural center and he is interested in Gregory publication, so he should be conscience bound to make some kind of official Federal statement for you to use in court. With testimony from someone with his official title and ACLU backing you would have strong case, even if the judge had never heard of WCW Patchen Jarrell or Rexroth or anyone since Ambrose Bierce. I’ll write him; it might be good for you to get in touch with him and tell him what you need. Has Village Voice, who knew me and Greg in NY, followed the case?
Who else—man I got the greatest—get Josephine Miles—no one can suspect her of any but most respectable judgment—to court in person—star witness. Well I’m rambling. [ ... ]
Would like to see the Hollander review in Partisan. Any other reviews I don’t know of, of interest? [...]
Have written very little but will sooner or later. When I have a manuscript I will send it to you to look at and publish if you can and want to; I won’t go whoring around NY publishers I promise. The trouble is, what long writing I’ve done is more or less unpublishable laterly—some autobiographical sexual history—send us all to jail. Burroughs’ influence has been to open up even more extreme areas and much more questionable taste, as far as subject... God knows where I’ll end up, elegies in the asshole of some Istanbul hermaphrodite, odes to cocaine (the connection is finally coming tonite—had hash and tea and opium here but no coke till now)—anyway, I don’t know what next—talking with Francis Bacon, a painter, a good one, interesting man, sort of an adventurer in regards to his painting (and won and lost 4000 at Monte Carlo and didn’t paint till he was 30) (and can always work as a cook)—and get idea of art as a funny sort of psychic gamble, an experiment with subjective areas and psychic material that can be dangerous personally—to say nothing of its publishability (its worth or its legal worth). This is some-what romanticized, but I guess it could be also literally true—if you stumbled on some de Sade like or saintly absolutism in your own nature—or sexual compulsion or whatever—in the act of writing. Something like that happens on small scale with Howl which gives it power. Would like to develop that, tho it perhaps means sacrificing any foreseeable audience—which I see Burroughs has done—and to some extent Kerouac in his solitary vigils over notebook.
Expected to leave here today, so would have missed your letter, but Peter came down with the grippe, so remaining till tomorrow or perhaps another day—then off thru Spain several weeks to Venice and settle there awhile. I’ll be out of touch more or less till I get to Venice. [ ... ]
I’d go to Paris but I have only 150 dollars and have to hole up with friend in Venice cheap. Paris costs even more in summer. Don’t know where the next loot comes from, but I guess things will work out alright, whatever happens. All mail previously sent to me here or Paterson will ultimately be forwarded to Venice—Burroughs remaining behind here a month more and will take care of that. I guess I’ll receive the books (25 copies) in Venice. Gave [Paul] Bowles my last copy. He’s been very nice, dug the poetry, still follows little magazines where he can get them. Add him perhaps to your list—next time you send out a list of works. He isn’t sinister; his life is safe and rather comfortable; but I suspect he would like to make it on wilder greater level. He reads WCW and would maybe order Kora in Hell.
Will you ever be in position to print some pocket prose? The Burroughs manuscript is pretty great. It’s more than the law will allow—as he commented, he’ll probably wind up with the distinction of being banned not only U.S. but also France. Sooner or later we’ll start circulating the publishable parts in U.S. IF you’re interested I’ll send you a block of it to look at when we have copies. I sure would like to see a reading of this at 6 Gallery, Kerouac might do it if the police were barred. I don’t think any court anywhere would uphold Burroughs. I can see ACLU reeling back aghast and audience staring in horror —and Burroughs leaning back laughing with a lushed up hashhead mad intelligent gleam in his Shakespearean eye. [ ... ]
As ever,
Allen
[Jack Kerouac was the person who most influenced Ginsberg’s writing style. For a while even Allen’s letters to Jack took on the more spontaneous travel narrative of On the Road. This letter is typical of that form before telephones became their favored method of communication and put an end to the great era of letter-writing.]
Allen Ginsberg [Venice, Italy] to Jack Kerouac [n.p.] August 13, 1957
Dear Jack:
Got your letter today, of Garver’s death, and the other letters before, and answering with big long letter now, I’ve been putting off, it’s such a big terrible letter, telling all about Europe, I’m sorry I waited so long, but thought every day and couldn’t sit at typewriter for fear of not writing something beautiful. But Bill is only in Copenhagen, after London, after Spain, waiting what to do, we (me and Peter) in Venice with Alan Ansen, Gregory (we hear from oftener) in Paris still (with big apartment someone loaned him and broke and hungry we sent him 5 dollars but he ate with Genet and met Brandos), and now we are all ready to take off. It costs only 20 and go to Greece and further Istanbul, before even seeing Paris—but all our plans are not fixed, so when you are ready in October after NY where else is there to go, come join us in Istanbul or Paris or live free at Ansen’s (pay for your own food rent free and lots free liquor) in Venice—we been here month and half now.
Peter and I left Alan [Ansen] and Bill [Burroughs] in Tangier and took off on our own with knapsacks into Spain, crossed straits, dolphins and rainbows at prow of ferry, wandered around in heart at Algeciras—June 5 [sic: June 11] it was—digging first European Spanish sidewalk cafés and gay mall life with no negroes and Tangerians and how cheap, 10 peso meals, cheaper than Tangier; we bought a 15 dollar railway ticket that gave us 4000 miles all over Spain reduced rate, and stood on long lines in shacks by ferries and got 2nd class train to Grenada, because I’d read about it in grammar school, gardens of Spain, and rode through Lorca sunset thru mountains and red sunset between castle hills without dragons, carrying T with us, enough for a few highs here and there, got to Grenada the same night, south of Spain, Andalusia they call it, especially because Peter wanted to dig gypsy caves there—big Paterson town with main streets and bars filled with cheap food, 5 peso fish soups, Peter got sick, something stomach. First thing a big cathedral so we went inside and stood under a vast dream machinery marble pillared arch that looked six blocks long, huge marble floor, and wandered around looking for St. Francis painted by El Greco, supposed to be there, he’s looking up to Heaven with long glistening eyes and long fingers hands crossed over grey breast, when we found it. Afternoon Peter slept and I took long walk up hills to castle on top of town, Alhambra, at nighttime, in the trees I couldn’t see where I was going, huge battlements and endless castles and walls I couldn’t get into, finally came to great Arabic looking gate and got on 20 foot wide parapet and looked over city and down on big gypsy hill, Lorca learned singing there, came down and walked into Sacramonte gypsy hill, big carloads of tourists rolling up road and many caves hung with copper frying pans and whitewashed roofs and neat doors entrances, pretty chairs with 20 German tourists sitting in circle and fifty mad gypsies singing and clapping hands and dancing Flamenco style (sound like Mar Chica but faster and weirder and more Jewish)—costs 50 pesetas to get in so I hang around door—beautiful thin gypsy came up to me in black silk pants and said he danced in Radio City Music Hall. I told him I had no loot so he put his 2 fingers and pulled down sides of his nose said “Sec,” meaning dry, meaning broke, so that’s the sign, the Zen sign in Spain, if you want to stop shoeshine boys from berating you. Great hill we both went there next day and drank wine silent in cheap cave bar where off duty entertainers go and young boys dressed like gypsies come in and make play dances like doodling while elders guggle wine, straw from bottle right down into throat, steady stream. Then finally made the Alhambra, they charge, but it’s free Sunday, huge six layer castles and gardens and finally the best part near where old wry cranky Washington Irving lived, an imaginary Arabian dream palace full of rooms of Arabesques, crawling up the walls and all over the ceiling, huge rooms every square inch filled with late Spenglerian magian three dimensional gold filled painted delicacies, every square foot changing as eye sweeps up to the starry domed ceiling blue, sat down and got high on purest eyeball kicks abstract—and while I’m writing sad Ansen still in his living room beslippered and afternooned in pajamas is putting on old 78 records of melancholy Wagner—Peter sick then, so I wander around the gardens and climb ramparts and overlook the gypsy hill and can see clay paths honeycomb it for centuries and gypsies and bicycles and mules winding up and down and still cock crows from hidden bottom of valley between and autos horns in the city below too, so I’m sitting in this vast quiet ancient garden where they used to have harems and smoke tea until exactly the year 1492 in fact when the Arabs was finally driven out of Spain. Then we took train again because Ansen wanted us to, see Seville, I always read about the big cathedral there—meanwhile getting more hipped on seeing every city everywhere—hit Seville it’s hot they got high narrow streets with white awnings spread from roof to roof over alleys so you can walk in cool, and a big black cathedral inside, and a huge tower we climbed and looked over Munich spires and church tops and Europe awnings and weathervanes and Dr. Mabuse. By this time we’re getting tired and money going too fast, we walk by rivers I’ve forgot, and arrive in taxis at museums which’re closed and sit exhausted in parks and walk cross-town by towers and Peter digging pretty girls but we don’t know what to do, so we go to Cordova, next stop and walk there late at night disgusted with heavy knapsacks and get another cheap nice room on narrow windey street, and next day go dig the Great Mosque, huge labyrinth inside of colored arches and more roomfuls of arabesques and a big church choir for Christ set up in the middle—and this was the biggest place in the world once too—great university center for remembrances of Aristotle and Jewish and Persian mystics holding hands and reviving classical learning and millions of people living in town—so down street to long quiet Guadalquivir River, and we sit down on embankment exhausted and look at washerwomen across stream and Roman bridge 2000 years old still sitting there motionless—only the trees have risen and fallen and millions of crops of grass waved and disappeared since Arabs sat by Guadalquivir, and later said a plaque, Cervantes rode by and stayed over and mentioned next door house where Don Quixote killed a monster—and so we crossed the bridge to a big nameless tower—ugh it’s too much to go through in detail—big clean tower peopled by state curators who took us around and said it was a million years old and Góngora the poet lived here like Williams on Passaic so had written big sad poem about how he always remembered the Guadalquivir washing dirty Spain, they got a stanza of it on a plaque by the river by the older Roman mud stone bridge, I sat down and cried and copied it down on postcard and sent it to Williams who loves Góngora, who had a big high domed brow and probably lived with candles and stepped in mud and horseshit every time he walked across centuries old bridge at night to the broken down mosque (where Ansen says he’s buried). But I sat by the river tired for two whole hours watching the water float by and old Spanish washer ladies drubbing in it. The Moon! the police! Klaxons across the Atlantic! Phaeton’s chariot falling in the sky! Time shifting with a million insects! Thousands of winters! Trees rising and falling on the riverbank! Old trees and new trees invisible and visible! The big muddy river in the sun! O Lorca’s góngora’d guadalquivir! Big vision on the riverbank by the million arched mosque, ancient Europe. Ran on, ran on, took train to Madrid all night, arrived morning Peter sick, I walk around with him hours looking for cheap room up and down old streets and leaky arches and tilted slums through the big Puerta Del Sol Times Square mobstreet full of buses and subways and artistical bookstores full of Spanish translations of Eliot and Picasso books, finally Peter sits in cafe while I explore RR station furnished room areas and we get one for 50 pesetas for 2 nothing cheaper, we’re disappointed, money going, we collapse in bed and I wake up and walk at nite, and next day run out in morning and run into Prado vast museum, halls of big glorious nowhere Rubens and Goobins, I run thru all the hundred halls digging everything as I pass out of corner of eye till all of a sudden I see the great magic picture of the West, I never dreamed of it before, none other than Brother Beatifical Angelical (Fra Angelico) his Annunciation—a huge picture made out of clearest pearly ivory white and shining green and delicious red full of delicate hand touches of long gowns and lines and kneeling angels and rosy virgin cool, and god’s gold small hands ushering out radiances of long golden streams of light from the upper left corner, thru which rides a dove with a halo down to the virgin kneeling and bowing down with her robes settling round her like in a dream underwater; all brilliant pearl surface colors outlined with fine exquisite sweepy lines and loose folds in angels robe showing turquoise angel-petticoat beneath; and great heavy gold wings; all against a bright new background of gold leaf on which Angelico’s made thousands of little etched lines with a stylus or pin, arabesques and designs inside the haloes, the design formulas of magical graces in the wings and halos, you got to stick your nose an inch away to even notice the detail all over, never see it in picture books at all—and on the left side off the porch which has high thin imaginary columns and starry blueblue ceiling, a shot of paradise and Adam and Eve simultaneously being ushered weeping out of the garden of Eden, floating along on a carpet of violet buds and greeney grass and angel over them with gold leaf sword—and on the bottom of that, along the border of the bottom, a series of magic box solid gay red and blue and green paintings in miniature of other scenes from life of Virgin: —the only Angelico in Spain. Guard saw me digging it and nodded and said it was the best picture in the whole Prado. I never saw such a beautiful painting, and immediately got all lit up about Angelico and hunted thru bookstores to see more reproductions, and learned thereby there were whole collections of them in Italy, Florence (where we went later, now, but later). Meanwhile (because at that instant I got Europe hungry and museum hungry and realized all the treasuries of Europe all over, in Italy and Spain and Moscow and Paris, all the vast collections of infinite pictures) Peter meanwhile broke out through bad sandwiches or something with hideous blotches of hives red and purple and ankles and knees swoll, swoll, and I’m running around, how’re we going to dig Madrid while he’s sick, we get doctor who says it’s something he et, so we live near market and Dr. prescribes cheap yoghurt and fresh fruit and zweiback —so I buy great baskets of strawberries (so cheap) and melons and pears and peaches and apples and bananas and tomatoes and grapes and ah cherries and juices and zweiback and yoghurt—which we eat for a week (except I sneak in some Spanish salami which gives Peter a relapse,) meanwhile we got this room in Madrid and privacy and we occasionally ball and dig each other and are depressed and coo out window on street naked, a big hailstorm comes up too, I try Prado high next day with Peter and don’t dig Angelico this time but stumble on the endless novels in the canvasses of Breughel—Triumph of Death—a million skeletons emerging from drum beats and bells tolled by skeleton and mountain opening and skeletons legions marching out and attacking everybody, the king fainting and ascetic in one corner, being upheld by skeleton with hourglass, poet in right-hand corner lutanisting his girlfriend, and behind her a skeleton playing violin, and behind him a table full of picnic hams and apples and a fine lady screaming while a skeleton in waiters cap brings up a silver plate with a picnic skull on it, and a cowardly looking jester crawling under the table, and Hal Chase lothario with sword and buckler turns around on the horde of advancing skeletons and draws his sword with his eyeballs popping and hair on end and in the middle an old lady fainted and her baby on her bosom yelling and a lean and hungry black long skeletal dog beginning to sniff at baby, and these maybe 10 details of a huge picture full of a thousand details, like a great poem, an epic, the Triumph of Death, Breughel, way off on a mountain a couple of skeletons tolling huge bells, and great crowds of people being herded into a black mine hole by an army of skeletons, and a big cart drawn by skeleton horse and driven by skeleton on riders seat drags a huge wagonload of skulls; and millions of skeleton armies more waiting behind a hole in the mountain to emerge and join the battle, numberless skeletons, and a lone skeleton up on a hill with a big sword whacking off the head of a man kneeling blindfold praying, and a skeleton over the mine hole banging away ecstatic at huge tom toms even a guy lying half asleep or sick in a nightmare right on the ground and a big mean skeleton bending over him looking in the eye and cutting his throat (like the other day hitchhiking out of Perugia we came thru a small town and passed by butcher and we stopped and saw a cow lying down on concrete garagelike floor and man bending over it with a knife, hacking away at its live throat, and he gave one cut, and the cow groaned and lifted up its ass and bled and fell, but only a cut an inch deep, and the whole neck’s a foot thick, so he bends down, like a small razor, and sliced another inch in—he did-n’t have the right knife, or the right business, or the right world, the cow lifted up, he gave another scratch, getting into the tendon by now, but nowhere near the death center, the cow snuffled and vomited blood and bled from nose like bull in bullring)—and I confess I shame saw another fucking bullfight in Madrid, with Peter—not again—(and kept hacking away at the huge tender neck, the cow still conscious and whacking up with ass and hind legs, tho bound down, every time, an old black Italian lady passed by stopped and cried out, “Niente de compassione” and shook her head and looked us in our eye to see if we were evil too, we all shook our heads—and it kept on for 10 minutes the man attacking the cow and the cow protesting and neck slowly being cut thru till finally it snapped, the cow stopped struggling, wriggled and bleed and fell astill suddenly, lump.)—and a dank brick well like behind factories at Paterson with 3 skeletons on the edge shoving a screaming knock-kneed warrior in, and a whole shipload of white robed skeletons blowing trumpets and supervising the battle, like the communists suddenly rose up in the factories and took over the means of production and killed everybody and turned into skeletons, and way back miles in the distance a big sea, with human ships burning and sinking, and castles in the water and skeletons overwhelming them on the towers and a thatch house surrounded by skeletons on the shore like cannibals in Africa, getting the men inside, and even the very trees in the landscape being burned and hacked down by lonely skeletons who got nothing else assigned to do and some vultures wheeling around in the sky faraway. And Bill was in Madrid last month he said, and didn’t even set foot in Prado alas. The thing is in Breughel you have to see the actual canvasses (or a life-size perfect photo which doesn’t yet exist) to see all the details, with your eye sometimes an inch away to see way in the distance a minute skeleton of a horse dragging a distinct but microscopic perfect brushwork wagon of skulls, that’s just as great and important in the picture as a big detail you can see from 20 feet away, a mountain or tree. Same goes for the other master Bosch whose great Garden of Delights we saw, in fact we were high, and we got up close and spent hours in Madrid digging just those two pictures—and the whole rest of Prado—El Greco rooms, and Poussin whom I dug for 3 dimension as he was loved by Cezanne—and the Great Deaf Man’s Room of Goya—walls of his old age rich lonely house he painted deaf for himself—big black fantastic Saturns eating own beautiful boy, battles of ugly giants, campfuls of negro witches—his big secret madman’s pictures, transported, huge 20 foot walls. So we spent several days digging all that at Prado and endless more, Botticelli and Roger Vander Weyden and Velasquez and other Dutch and Spanish dullards and French refinements we got a good education now. But there was only one Breughel in Prado. But we read there’s seven huge great Breughels nearby in Vienna, we go there in 2 weeks. But so we also took train out to Greco’s Toledo for a day and walked up and down in and out and around city looking for magic spot of his View of Toledo, only we didn’t have postcard picture of the picture, and couldn’t find the spot, tho the scenery was great, and we walked miles on the other side of river around cliffs and walls of piled high Toledo, and asked people, but nobody knew where it was or even knew the picture—it’s in NY—so came back to town—and saw in book he made up the scene—changed the composition of the town around to fit his sky I guess—we kept getting mixed up where the church was in relation to river and bridge, but he mixed them up on purpose—but I took a picture of us overlooking moody sky Toledo and we also saw all his great paintings there. Including big orgasmic explosion of a last judgment The Burial of Count Orgaz. I took long walks and double deck buses by big filmy fountains and wide Mexico City downtown Madrid streets and back to Porta del Sol old-time center and new hep center of town and looked up hip movie producer who introduced me to job hunting Lafferties and Crus working for construction companies but it was too many slow papers to fill out so we left next for train to Barcelona and rode up the Mediterranean coast by rocks and arrived and walked into Barcelona’s Barrio Gothico, high dark stone tenements look like fortresses with alleys in between and up the Great Rambla, huge street for walking and benches cost a peseta to sit all day and look at flower sellers, and into Genet’s Barrio Chino, swinging cheap slum, half gothic, half bombed out (Spanish Civil War, and my father’d written a poem then “When Bombs on Barcelona Burst (1937) / I was 10 thousand miles away / but all the walls around me cracked / and fell apart in disarray”), whorehouses, little art restaurants a place like Valeska Gerts and expensive for old Babylonians and Giroux, and dark downstairs Rembrandtesque workingman’s restaurants where we ate whole meals, great soups, for 8 pesetas only—got a hotel room like garret at Paris, high up, huge room with little window sunset came thru all orange and red on the sheets, went out but couldn’t find any wild Genet life—so went to ancient old stained glass cathedrals, vast pillars and caves, and a museum Meyer Shapiro’d have dug, or did once, best collection Romanesque painting in world, now prepared to dig all primitive old colors and cartoons and christs and saints as depicted by mysterious ancient figures with paintbrushes in castles and monasteries, don’t remember any great sexy piece there tho lots of half naked thin angular leering christs hanging on crosses and later sophisticated smooth virgins and mages. Wildest monument in Barcelona is a fantastic unfinished church by mad architect Antonio Gaudi, elder and inspirer of Dali and Picasso, started 1885 thereabout—only got four weird inter-connected towers full of holes like gingerbread castle, but huge skyscrapers, you can climb around on, filled with strange beastly stone carvings and already after 50 years so weirdly balanced it scares you way up inside especially as it’s already cracking and huge windows held together only by lately acquired rusty pieces of wire and whole balconies crumbling with jagged cracks in soft stone—need 25 million dollars to finish it they said, and still had workmen banging away downstairs at another part of the church (Sagrada Familia) constructing another door—what we were on only a door, planned to be biggest church in world, downstairs a mad plaster model looks like secret communist Kremlin RR station mosque instead of a church, but apparently all real at least they’re building it—elsewhere in Barcelona a big children’s park with strange name (Guell Park) he built, acres of gingerbread castles and strange balconies rising out of hills and flowerpots 10 feet high made out of rough stones cemented together with flowers (real) growing out top and big octopus-like soccer fields surrounded by thousand foot mosaic snake bench for mommas with baby carriages. Also we went up a cablecar up a mountain overlooking city to strange heavenly amusement park with roller airplanes and sideshows and jukeboxes full of rock and visions of Harlem in penny arcade theatre miniature showboxes, and Arizona in the penny movies, movies of “Far West,” and we walked past and looked in a big fascist silent radio station in the bushes guarded by police, but what we were doing there I dunno so we got bored and went away after staring at them in plate-glass window at huge apparatuses and dial machines and IBM switchboards—3 men needed a shave drinking coffee and playing ticktacktoe and an amusement park outside and twilight deepening over the city below in the fog and lights of yellow going on in the great boulevards and everybody getting the funicular train go home so it fell silent on the mountain and got dark. Mt. Tibidabo. And saw a strange silent boy with a beard, full black strong beard talking to an Austrian on streets of Barrio Cjine, just a glimpse. Spent another day goofing around, at huge paella meal, saw more painting museums, and at nite took off finally for the great border of France, bought ticket to Perpignan, and thought to hit there at midnight—train rolling along at nite approaching Pyrenees disappointing foothills.
Arrived at border town finally big excitement we still had pocketful of T but nobody at any borders searches Americans, didn’t even look in knapsacks, and changed money at lousy rate of 350 having goofed totally and neglected to get Francs in Tangier—and rushed on new modern electric streamlined roomy French train to Perpignan, an hour ride ahead, for we knew (from poet Blackburn in Mallorca whom I’d contacted for info) that Perpignan center for fruit growing industry sends trucks all nite to Marseilles and Paris to hitch on. But when we’d arrived in Perpignan and walked a mile down dark quiet streets thru center of town to wholesale district it was dead night three and nobody around and big huge trucks asleep with no drivers, and cafe truck stop all folded up for nite, chairs piled up, no yelling mobs of electric lights all nite like we thought, so walked two blocks to park, unfolded sleep bags first time in Europe and lay down under high old trees to sleep on bench, and mosquitoes buzzed later, and dawn light began came, we pissed and walked 3 miles out in country, still no trucks, till about 5AM they started rolling thru, but nobody picked us up, we stood in front of old outskirts of town Raimu cafe, watched him open at morn and read paper and have coffee on outdoor table and stare at us, but not bugged, all the trucks roll past and no private cars but little Europe midget cars not big enuf for 3 people and 2 huge lousy knapsacks, so hiking lousy, in fact, inexistent, stood there till noon and maybe got a 10 km. ride and stood in another small town by a river and waited another 5 hours watching farmer’s horse cart drag up huge wagon size casks to fill with water under a shady elm by well and roll out to water field, us drinking cheap fine milk and cakes and eating salami and bread and pastry and cheeses and fruit and water. Finally picked up and got to Beziere, a town mentioned by Pound as haunt of Provencal poets and Jongleours so stopped there and walked uphill to the town to look at church and arrived in middle of Dr. Mabuse funeral with tall pillars and tall black parishioners and a wild loud organ screeching against the stone and longhaired organist and the whole town full of old black ladies lined up around a coffin like in T.C. [The Town and the City] and a rose window shining down on the scene from faraway upstairs. A big plaza outside, a stone balcony and beyond panorama of intimate green valley all French and cultivated with shining rivers and microscopic mules and roads winding thru trees and ancient charms of country Provencal. Down again to Rue George Sand where we left knapsacks and another hot walk past RR station to outskirts and waited in dust on bad hitch spot, cars whiz by too fast, it’s been all day and we only got 40 km, so we give up, money getting low, can’t dawdle like that thru So. France, take train to Montpellier (realized we couldn’t make it hitching) and arrive at nite midnite and go walking looking for food now beat with heat and sleepless tired and stumble on a big bookstore filled with French communists having an intellectual party, like old bupkis [sic: bumpkins], except also selling Mayakovski and Cocteau and Picasso—a cell leader looked like Frankel come up and began asking us who we were and we said artistes and got into argument about whether world existed to be communized or whether world didn’t exist anyway, I said no. But they hold meetings and are evil mentalists but at least there they’re free to have open meetings, it was amazing to see like shift back in time to U.S. 1934 near River St. Paterson when reds were only innocent bumpkins I thought. So we’re just wandering around waiting for a train to Marseilles and run down streets and stairways to lower older part of town to university crowded district and the cathedral there, which somewhere I’d heard of, I turn alley and see a vast pillar 20 feet thick like a gothic tower going up high as eye can see at nite, and roof on top and another sister pillar, dream pillars, supporting porch of great cathedral—that’s all I saw except walls and crooked streets all around, a glimpse and rushed back to RR and there was the same youth with black beard from Barcelona adjusting his great knapsack—heavy as iron, with fur on outside, I went over where he was and talked in Spanish and he looked up with big sweet eyes and talked back, about knapsack heavy, and led him to Peter (who also had big red beard) and he recognized him from Barcelona streets, so we all went across street to park (where earlier on bench Peter got in big incomprehensible conversation with drunk old crone in black) bench to hold hands and wait for train, and he (John by name) short built like iron angel, said he from Zurich and had walked six months across the Alps and down France all the way to Barcelona, working everywhere in farms and cities and reading Nietzsche and maybe was a painter—but we couldn’t talk much, except for strange sudden love reasons dug each other, I didn’t understand how he carried 120 pound knapsack, and totally alone, all over, had walked thru Italy and Austria and was then heading finally back home to parents in high mountain town in Alps, actually, Zermatt maybe not Zurich; after hour our train come and we exchange addresses, he should live in McCorkle shack I think, (Peter sleeping drowsing on bench). Time for train and he carries Peter’s sack into station to wait there bid goodbye, in fact when we shake hands suddenly, as Peter puts arms round him, bashful, he suddenly kisses him on neck and to me the same farewell, a great sad bearded European youthtime stranger true-love comrade kiss, I felt great thrill of meeting face to face reality of heart again —and as train was pulling out he reappeared in our compartment, with strange trifle gift, a bag of grapes for thirst, tender and looked at us and said goodbye and disappeared with his huge knapsack. That’s how we should all love each other.
Big hallucinated night full of train—(on the Riviera Cezanne Coast)
September 5. Never finished this—Leaving for Paris day after tomorrow and cleaning up desk—will pick up from there and tell you everything else we’ve done so you don’t miss nothing of Europe.
Love
Allen
[Once in Paris, Ginsberg settled down for a long residence and was finally able to get back to writing poetry. He played with some lines about his mother, which eventually became Kaddish, perhaps his greatest poem.]
Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to Jack Kerouac [?] November 13, 1957
Dear Jack:
Gregory brought his letter over, I’ll add a page and save stamps and reassure you, we are all still here, not bounded over Atlantic—reason I’m so still is I’m confronted with great backlog of unanswered letters, have just been sick in bed with Asia flu for 2 weeks, ago to now and been reading book on Apollinaire and learning more French. Suddenly I can read French a little better—not enough to read books, but enough to read poems I see quoted in books—I am all hung up on French poetry, I went into a big bookstore, saw French translations of whole plays by Mayakovsky, pamphlets of fine funny poems by Esenin, then the big bookshelves of XX century French bohemians, Max Jacob, Robert Desnos (a French girl said I looked like Desnos profile) Reverdy, Henri Pichette —all their huge books, Fargue, Cendrars, etc., names, I never read them, but read a few by each, all personal and alive, Prevert, and all the funny surrealists, so I want to improve French and dig them, none translated, and all fine fellows, I can see from the pages of loose sprawled longlined scribblings they’ve published for 50 years here now—what sad treasuries for Grove or City Lights if anybody ever were able to have time and intelligence enough to organize and edit and transliterate them all, would be marvelous to read in U.S.—most of it almost unknown really. Anyway my French I happy to say, getting better so one day I’ll be like R. [Richard] Howard with French books in my house in Paterson and be able maybe to enjoy them.
Gregory as you can see, he improved in Frisco, and he improved since, and now is even riper, and is like an Apollinaire, prolific and golden glories period for him, in his poverty too marvelously, how he gets along here hand to mouth, daily, begging and conning and wooing, but he writes daily marvelous poems like the enclosed—enough already for another huge book since last month’s City Lights manuscript Gregory is in his golden inspired period, like in Mexico, but even more, and soberer solemner, calm genius every morning he wakes and types last nite’s 2 or 3 pages of poems, bordering on strangeness, now he’s even going further, will enter a classical phase soon and possibly construct structural poems and explore big forms, his genius showered with strangeness.
We are getting lots of great junk too, better than anything I ever had with Bill or Garver, so pure horse we sniff it, simply sniff, no ugly vaginal needles, and get as good almost a bang as a main line, but longer lasting and stronger in long run. Very cheap here too, and this around for Louvre visits.
Not yet explored Paris, just inches, still to make solemn visits to cemeteries Père Lachaise and visit Apollinaire’s menhir (MENHIR) and Montparnasse to Baudelaire.
Granite surrounded by ivy.
I sat weeping in Cafe Select, once haunted by Gide and Picasso and well dresst Jacob, last week writing first lines of great formal elegy for my mother—
“Farewell
with long black shoe
Farewell
smoking corsets and ribs of steel
farewell
communist party and broken stocking
O mother
Farewell
with six vaginas and eyes full of teeth and a long black beard around the vagina
O mother
farewell
grand piano ineptitude echoing three songs you know
with ancient lovers Clement Wood Max Bodenheim my father
farewell
with six black hairs on the won of your breast
with you sagging belly
with your fear of grandma crawling on the horizon
with your eyes of excuses
with your fingers of rotten mandolins
with your arms of fat Paterson porches
with your thighs of ineluctable politics
with your belly of strikes and smokestacks
with your chin of Trotsky
with your voice singing for the decayed overbroken workers
with your nose full of bad lay with your nose full of the smell of pickles of Newark
with your eyes
with your eyes of tears of Russia and America
with your eyes of tanks flamethrowers atom bombs and warplanes
with your eyes of false china
with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots
with your eyes of America taking a Fall
O mother O mother
with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an ambulance
with your eyes of Aunt Elanor
with your eyes of Uncle Max
with your eyes of your mother in the movies
with your eyes of your failure at the piano
with your eyes being led away by policemen to ambulance in the Bronx
with your eyes of madness going to painting class in night school
with your eyes pissing in the park
with your eyes screaming in the bathroom
with your eyes being strapped down on the operating table
with your eyes with the pancreas removed
with your eyes of abortion
with your eyes of appendix operation
with your eyes of ovaries removed
with your eyes of womens operations
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy
with your eyes of stroke
with your eyes of divorce
with your eyes alone
with your eyes
with your eyes
with your death full of flowers
with your death of the golden window of sunlight ...”
I write best when I weep, I wrote a lot of that weeping anyway, and get idea for huge expandable form of such a poem, will finish later and make big elegy, perhaps less repetition in parts, but I gotta get a rhythm up to cry.
Re Lafcadio: Good news, suddenly the long-lost father Orlovsky appeared on scene, visited, promised $10 a week support family, talked gravely and dignified with Laf, the crises in household still go on, but now not critical, no mad deeds will be done, so it can wait Peter’s return—we wrote you unrealizing you were already out of NYC—meanwhile Joyce Glassman wrote us and proposed she investigate with Donald Cook, so the situation’s there in hand and we got sensible fine letter from Laf, he has beard he says and will be great artist of space and time and draws constantly and sent us a burning red face in crayon of Laf-spaceman-mystic with eyeshields of red glasses.
Let me know when plays are ready. I think play down the Beat Generation talk and let others do that, it’s just an idea, don’t let them maneuver you into getting too hung up on slogans however good, let Holmes write up all that, just as “S.F. Renaissance” is true, but nothing to make an issue of (for us). I mean I’ve avoided generally talking in terms of SF as if it were an entity. You only get hung on publicity-NY-politics if you let them or be encouraged to beat BEAT drum—you have too much else to offer to be tied down to that and have to talk about that every time someone asks your opinion of weather —it’ll only embarrass you (probably already has). Let Holmes handle that department. Next time someone asks you say it was just a phrase you tossed off one fine day and it means something but not everything. Tell them you got 6 vaginas.
Ron Loewinsohn wrote, and sent me one great poem, he’s really finally got something wild he wrote, a short poem “The White Rhinoceros,” good a Whalen good poem—this for later reference—he’s the youngest active person of generation (and a half) younger than us—already he write me putting down Howl as a museum piece like Baudelaire but of now no use—his reactions be interesting—but in long run he’s not sad and mad enough.
Peter on junk dreamed of a funeral all the taxicabs went to in Paris, one taxi had died.
Ansen on a surprise visit to Paris for a week arrives in 3 days.
Bill’s manuscript [Naked Lunch] was read by Mason Hoffenberg who pronounced it the greatest greatest book he read of all time, Mason brought it to Olympia and assures me it’ll be taken (Mason wrote a porno book for them [Candy] and knows them and is also an advisor) he is astounded by WSB and his reaction I gave great sigh of relief, I think everything’ll be alright with the book, it’ll be published here in toto intact. Meanwhile Bill sent me another 30 pages and says he has another hundred coming up with new final character like Grand Inquisitor who will wrap the whole book up in one unified theme and stream and interspace—time plot and fill in all lacunae and unify everything into perfect structure and delight, so.
I guess it will be published here then in the Spring. I wait to hear word this week and then will notify Bill. If. I think it’ll work out they’ll buy it tho terms are lousy, they only pay $600 per printing (i.e. if reprinted he gets another 600) but I’ll try get a formal contract reserving all mag. rights for Evergreen to Bill etc. I have to contact [Sterling] Lord and get name of his Paris office and have them arrange legal details as I personally don’t want to be responsible for another fuckup like Wyn. However with fugitive shady Olympia, the terms of publication seem bound to be disadvantageous and nothing much can be done, except the great main thing get book into print once for all. Perhaps I’m proceeding too nervously and in too much haste merely to get book in print irregardless of business hallucination dignities Bill deserves and might demand—what you think? I don’t know, I be relieved to see it actually accepted. But I’ll try to have Lord’s Paris office protect Bill. [ ... ]
I get lots of letters, also from many unknown young businessmen who tearfully congratulate me on being free and say they’ve lost their souls. I have to answer them all and have several dozen letters to write—which is why I seldom go near the typewriter, which is why I haven’t written you. And then I owe Levine [LaVigne] 6 letters, and Whalen, and McClure started writing me again (he was seized with madness when he saw your Blues book, evidently Ferl is showing it around) and called it the great poem since Milton—also said he wept reading Road, in urinal scene with Neal, where you quarrel. And I always owe letters to Bill—and my unfinished project to finish another 50 pages letter to you recording continuing our Europe tour—still have all Italy and Vienna and Munich and Amsterdam to tell you about—which will do soon—and typing up poetry which I rarely do—there isn’t enough time for all the great flowery tasks. You must be snowed under, more than me, I wish I knew all details. (Oh, I found Lord’s address, never mind).
Still no sign Genet. What novel you writing? (“Zizi’s Lament” is incidentally about a new disease we sent Bill a clipping about) KURU, a relative to Asian Amok and Latah, a laughing disease, “whole villages laughing themselves to exhaustion and death.”
I thought record was rotten (I played it in front of painter hipsters here and cringed) but Ferl says I should make a new full length LP he’ll put out with Fantasy records (it’s all signed up and arranged) so as soon as I get voice back after flu will record whole book and new poems too. My record with Grove is censored and I’m mad and I got embarrassed, by my own tone because where I really rescued tearful seriousness in that particular reading was in parts 2 and 3 (which continued upward in beauty and non-goofing intensity tears)—and I asked Grove to print those parts on record—which advice ignored—so far as I think it’s all a goof that record—they missed the big meat, those vultures. However it don’t really matter. Besides I put out good record in time, or not, but will. So disgusted I sold my copy of record here for 800 francs to eat with (less than $2 to someone who was going to England). Bookstore friend of Ferl here has big window display of 50 copies of my book and sells a few a week so I get small income from that.
What number best seller are you nowadays? How dreamy that all is. Thank god. Neal wants $5000 or has he not written? We were talking about your money, our own fantasies and demands, but nothing we grub for will match Neal’s final Great Demand for 50 or ten thous for the hosses. Whatcha gonna do? I should write him a letter. I wonder what he’s thinking. When Howl trial was over there was a front page banner headline all across page of SF Chronicle announcing results—wonder what he thought—and did he see you on TV? [...]
My father and brother write you seemed confused and nowhere on TV, were you high? I supposed they missed the mad drama, dream.
I got mad long Rimbaud letter from boy in Bordentown Reformatory [Ray Bremser]. I wrote mad Rimbaud letter to [Rosalind] Constable at time saying [Henry] Luce should send me (and you) (and Peter and Greg) on secret trip Russia. She said she passed letter along, who knows? And wished us well, was sad, in our greatness. I wrote Gary. Whalen in N.W [North West.]
Love, Tears and Kisses
Allen
[Orlovsky had to return to New York to take care of his family’s mental health problems. Ginsberg stayed in Europe for another seven months and kept in touch with Peter via airmail letters.]
Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to Peter Orlovsky [New York, NY] January 20, 1958
Dear Petey:
O Heart O Love everything is suddenly turned to gold! Don’t be afraid don’t worry the most astounding beautiful thing has happened here! I don’t know where to begin but the most important. When Bill came I, we, thought it was the same old Bill mad, but something had happened to Bill in the meantime since we last saw him. I did not realize it that first evening and day, nor for another day after you’d left, but last night we stayed up till 3 AM talking, like you and I talk, clearing up everything—first we started arguing and misunderstanding as usual, I afraid he had come to claim me now you’d left, he still sherlock-holmes poker-faced impassive, I thought he was tormenting cats still, was worried, felt depressed, I sat on bed cried realizing you were gone and I was alone in this miserable situation, I even got hi on T which made it worse, Francine came in too and leered at me and tried to climb all over me, I was at my wits end, I fell silent terrified on the bed—then a knock on the door—this is 2 nights ago, Saturday nite—and Gregory walked in with great publishing news from Germany (about that, later)—I was so glad to see him, he seemed so familiar and reassuring, only one left from when we were together here, when you were still here, I thought he would save me from sordid sorrows with Satanic Bill—but last night finally Bill and I sat down facing each other across the kitchen table and looked eye to eye and talked, I confessed all my doubt and misery—and in front of my eyes he turned into an Angel!
What happened to him in Tangier this last few months? It seems he stopped writing and sat on his bed all afternoons thinking and meditating alone and stopped drinking—and finally dawned on his consciousness, slowly and repeatedly, every day, for several months—awareness of “a benevolent sentient (feeling) center to the whole Creation”—he had apparently, in his own way, what I have been so hung up on in myself and you, a vision of big peaceful Lovebrain—said it gave him (came sort of like a revelation slowly) courage to look at his whole life, me, him more dispassionately—he had been doing a lot of self-analysis. Said his whole trip to Paris not to claim me but visit me now and also see an analyst to clear up psychoanalytic blocks left, etc. We talked a long time got into tremendous rapport, very delicate, I almost trembled, a rapport much like yours and mine, but not sexual, he even began to dig my feelings about that, my willingness but really I don’t want to, has stopped entirely putting pressure on me for bed—the whole nightmare’s cleared up overnight, I woke this morning with great bliss of freedom and joy in my heart, Bill’s saved, I’m saved, you’re saved, we’re all saved, everything has been all rapturous ever since—I only feel sad that perhaps you left as worried when we waved goodbye and kissed so awkwardly—I wish I could have that over to say goodbye to you happier and without the worries and doubts I had that dusty dusk when you left—that you could have heard the conversation, taken part—I’m sure now henceforth when you meet again there’ll be no more anxiety between you and Bill, all this is gone from him—the first day there, between us here, when we 3 were together—Bill was still very hesitant and unsure of himself, still hadn’t come out—still doubting perhaps but knew inside, as we did not yet, that everything was OK, but still too withdrawn to know to clear it all up—but I know for sure now he’s OK and consequently I feel like a million doves—Bill is changed nature, I even feel much changed, great clouds rolled away, as I feel when you and I were in rapport, well our rapport has remained in me, with me, rather than losing it, I’m feeling to everyone, something of the same as between us. And you? What’s happening inside Dear Pete? I read Bill your poems, I’ll type them and send them soon, everything is happening so fast. I feel like I can write even. Are you OK? Write me happy letter, don’t be sad, I love you, nothing can change love, beautiful love, once we have it. I cried the other night realizing you’d gone, thinking that love would go away with you and I’d be alone without connection—but now I see Bill is really on same connection as we are—and I begin to feel connected with everything and everyone, the universe seems so happy. I made it with him the other night, to be good, on junk, before he and I talked, treated him sweetly, as you once treated me, but after our talk and new understanding, there’s not even any more need for that, we get along on nonsexual level—maybe occasionally later an overflow we make it—but he no longer needs me like he used to, doesn’t think of me as permanent future intimate sex schlupp lover, thinks even he’ll wind up maybe after difficulties, with women, we slept apart in different rooms last night, both happy, first time I was alone in bed, I was happy, I missed you (jacked off even), Bill woke me up in the morning, had happy breakfast, talked more, the rapport real, Bill’s change real, I changed too, no longer suspicious and worried of him, he doesn’t even bother the cat—I’m continuing to keep your calendar—Bill will accept you—have no more fear, remember Nature is really kind, loves you, he’s getting to be as kindly feeling as you and I do at our best when we’re not worried—he said he was still sunk and irritable when we were all together in Tangier—the doubt and uncommunication still hung-over unresolved your last day here maybe,—but absolutely it’s really now gone, have big peacy happy slumber dreams—Life is so great, and best of all Bill completely aware of this. So we took long walk, it was a blue fine unfoggy day, downtown. Jack wrote nice letter from Florida, sent me all the money, arrived this morning ($225), so we walked downtown to the Opera to Amer Express, cashed it into Travelers checks, now I got plenty money and Bill has, I repaid him what he loaned us. Don’t send me money, I have all I need—maybe later in a few months I be poorer, but right now I have plenty plenty and small expenses, shared with Bill, he no longer lives high anyway so we live cheap henceforth—don’t send me the $10, keep it now you’ll need it, in fact, if you really get in hole tell me I’ll send you some. So Jack says he’s in Fla. and movies look like they’ll buy his book now and he asks where you are, so write him a card (Enclosed find Lafcadio’s letter to you arrived 2 days ago).
Also Gregory: he came back, happy, he and Bill got along great, Bill likes him, and Alan Ansen wrote Gregory great warmhearted letter saying don’t worry about money, come to Venice and stay happy there and safe awhile, let me know if you need money for RR fare there. How strange, Alan suddenly woke up too? I don’t know, but it was a great letter from him to Greg. Meanwhile in Germany, Gregory made arrangement for Gregory (not me, it’s better this way leaves me free in fact. good deal) to put together one small anthology of me Bill Jack Greg, expensive, and to help in a larger volume of Amer and SF poetry to be published in a few months. So he’s going to work on that now in Venice. Furthermore the Germans offered him an apartment in old university town of Heidelberg, for 6 months after Venice, thru the summer, so now he knows where he can go next. He also sending another long Coit-Tower type madpoem to fill out his book for City Lites, so that’s going to be good too.
Meanwhile also, a letter arrived from America saying Bill’s Junky had been finally sold and published in England and Bill is due some more money (under a hundred) from that.
Got on big discussion with Bill of means of extending Love-Bliss to others and spreading the connection between us (told him we had intended that in Tangier with him, even if it didn’t work) without sacrificing intimacy. We’ll solve that problem too before we’re done. I feel so good today it don’t seem hard. It’s just that there aren’t many people who’ve experienced the freedom that we have. Jack’s letter today was nice, and more friendly—but I think he still is doubtful and secret—or doesn’t know that we know, or something. But that’ll turn to gold later and we’ll all get straight with Jack next time we see him too.
So money’s rolling in, honey, and love’s rolling in. I’ll see you in 6 months like I said. Are you alright? Write me as fast as you can. I’m worried you’re unhappy and got too much trouble in front of you in NY. Julius will be hard to help. We’ll see what we can do. But don’t let your own sweet tender knowing Pete be eat by worry. I’ll always be with you, and so will the trees and all the rainbows and angels in Heaven be singing last happy cowboy songs with shiny eyes at us.
Tell Lafcadio to stop being Christ of Mars and I’ll stop being unhappy Christ of poetry. No more Crucifixions! Regards to your momma and Marie.
XXXXXXX. How’s the ship? Don’t take too much horse. I’ve quit T entirely it’s a bringdown and I doan want no more bum kicks. Bill smokes less too. But it varies with everyone. Black Mountain Review came out, Creeley editor.—get it at 8th St. Bookstore—send me a copy maybe.
Love,
Allen (with your green pen)
Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to Herschel Silverman [Bayonne, NJ] February 22, 1958
Silverman, Silverman, why are you writing me mad letters full of extravagant neon imagery in long versicles like hiccups
Silverman, Silverman, what you expect, I should get involved in politics about bricks and cultures when I can fly off on the nearest golden cloud of meditation and find myself giggling by the Seine?
Silverman, Silverman, it was never sex and jazz and trains and booze I loved,
It was boys full of light and trains full of black music and the voice of William Blake roaring in my ear in Harlem
reminding me of Silverman, Silverman, woeful in Bayonne dreaming of frank symbols exploding horrible truths over New Jersey
while the silver wooly lamb came in his lunch cart sat down and shyly ordered vegetable hamburger from Silverman, Silverman weeping at the icebox of systematic Meat.
Allen
Merry Xmas
Happy New Year
Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to Gary Snyder [Corte Madera, CA] April 2, 1958
Dear Gary:
Glad to hear from you, got your card, I wrote you a few letters, long some, to strange address Don Allen sent me but I guess they never got to you Gary. Anyway I been here in Europe all this time, to sum up, 2½ months in Tangier being Burroughs’ slave typing up his manuscript and cooking for everybody, awful routine, good time there, met Bowles and Francis Bacon painter, took off with Peter thru Spain and toured all great monuments mosques of Cordoba and Alhambra and Toledo Madrid Barcelona then to Venice, stayed at Ansen (friend from NY—Jack describes weekend in his house in Subterraneans) for 2 months, more museums and more cooking, then trip with Peter to Florence and Rome and Assisi, slept on grass and bugged the monks hand in hand begging food and conversation, then back to Venice and trip alone back to Rome and Naples and Capri and Ischia (saw Auden a few nites and only argued lunacy), then with Peter again thru Vienna so to see Breughel paintings, then a few days in Munich, then here in Paris got a room with cookstove gas and went sightseeing and settled down but didn’t write much, then Amsterdam visited Gregory there for a month, nice quiet Dutch canals and calm whore streets girls in windows like legal mannequins, then back to Paris, goofed for a few months doing nothing, then Peter left for U.S. to take care of brothers (and now has job in my old Langley Porter type bughouse as attendant in NYC), Burroughs arrived here (all full of new fine enlightenment, for him, all his old evil Baudelairian ennui begone—he meditated for half a year alone in Tangier and said he experienced first time the “indifferent benevolent sentience at center of things”—sort of a late life crisis for him, came to Paris to get last frazzles psychoanalyzed and has room downstairs, and Gregory went to Frankfurt where he contacted German poets who commissioned him to make anthology of young U.S. poets, then he went stayed with Ansen in Venice; now he’s back and also has room in this hotel—which is right near Place St. Michel, on left bank near St. Germain Center, my hotel itself only a few steps away from the Seine near Notre Dame Isle de Cité,—great—tho I don’t go out too much, lately, I sit and loom and gloom and brood, don’t know what’s the matter guess I’ll come off it sooner or later—too much poetry or self or publicity or ideas about myself, hard to get out of, particularly as I was so involved, self involved, well anyway hope I’m getting out of that, so then took a trip to England, 3 weeks, slept on Parkinson’s couch, visited Turnbull, Gael, doctor near Stratford, and drove to Stonehenge with Parkinson and wife, and made weepy BBC record, then back to Paris been here a month or 2 getting restless and hope, tho broke right now, to take off for Berlin-Warsaw, maybe Moscow, if I can get any money. Bill has income so no starvation now. Never did really starve, just ran out of money, so got fragments of loot from family or royalties or records or selling books or BBC—actually have been getting quite a lot of money in this last half year—almost maybe 70 a month or more—so no real problems. I get royalties from City Lights, they sold about 10,000 I hear, so owe me another 200 this month, will use that and take off for more travel—still not seen eastern part Europe nor Greece. After that sometime in summer, July, will go back to NYC, rejoin Peter, and figure off from there what next. Not written anything very great, that’s bugged me, overanxious to please I guess and follow Howl up, obsessional, so just a lot of self conscious long lines about politics, horrid, some funny tho—I don’t know I have a lot of manuscript. But maybe there’s something left I’m afraid to begin typing it all lest it stink. Meanwhile I am about the same a little more withdrawn and frightened in a way can’t smoke tea I get paranoiac and read the newspapers thru every day worrying about politics—they got cops with machine guns on every block here now, like Berlin 1934, after the Arabs, the Algerian war nobody talks much about but it’s a big drag it’s happening and the soul of Paris seems dead—frightening tho to walk out at midnight near Notre Dame and run into a black street full of thousands of nightmare cops with machine guns sitting smoking waiting inside huge black Maria vans expecting some kind of military coup or Arab riot or student demonstration god knows what—shout in the streets here I keep feeling, run wild in the streets and you never know what would happen. America from here after year and half seems like your “This Tokyo” poem only worse, sort of unconsciously perpetuating a war, Dulles spouting about saving world for white Christians etc., gave France half a billion dollars so that keeps the Algeria war going which is insoluble now anyway everybody so filled with hate there, newspapers suppressed here in Paris, Sartre magazine seized etc.—well a lot of bullshit but very oppressive so close up, I guess you got some kind of an idea traveling around the east—in fact what kind of an idea did you get I wonder about present history, seems to me America’s taking a fall, i.e. all Whitmanic freedom energy all fucked up in selfishness and exclusion like a big neurotic paranoid that’s about to crack up. Talked to some of the 41 U.S. students who made it thru Moscow youth festival to Red China, they shot all the junkies and prostitutes there and I read some Mao and Khrushchev announcements about literature, all brainwash party control—seems to be a different world. I sure would like to go traveling thru that red world and see what it’s like. Burroughs very interested in Japan so, me too, I guess next world wander I head east—you any plans for going back there—or for that matter coming here? Jack writes you maybe off for hike tour with him thru West that sounds fine. But what happened, to you? Anything great from monastery? I saw some of your poems, that Phil sent Gregory for the German anthology, liked them they’re fine, some I’d seen before in NY, most in fact. Read thru Phil’s again last night and they really picked me up, I was depressed I wound up feeling real great after finishing them including some new series called Takeouts he has... By the way, if can dig Ron Loewinsohn, he sent Gregory a whole mess of really good poems, amazing, I didn’t think he’d so forcefully come up with out of his 20s or 23s year, seems he has a girl and some kind of terrific great love match with her, and writes a lot, more or less isolated in SF says it’s empty except for fairy poet clique he can’t make, maybe true—sometimes he sounds a little like Whalen, but he seems at least in poetry very much an enterprising spirit and very alive. Also heard from McClure who’s changed somewhat for better, shipped out, read thru Jack’s Mex City Blues and flipped over them and got a room in the Wentley, Polk and Sutter, LaVigne there and Neal around there too says LaVigne, and McClure been writing weirdly and more free. How is Locke, and Sheila? Give them my best. What’s happening around SF now I wonder? NY is strange, Jack and Peter write, everybody in the Village is giving poetry readings, lots of excitement, even Lamantia there reading, all sorts of small clubs and bars, strange—I saw some of the poetry by young people tho it looks lousy, but with spirit. If you have manuscript you want to send out there are a few places Gregory, Phil, Jack and me have been sending to the last few months; Chicago Review, Climax, Yugen, Partisan Review, Black Mountain Review, Measure —John Wieners, interesting Olson type, in SF somewhere, Loewinsohn or Whalen or McClure know, I haven’t his address. Chicago Review picked up on Burroughs with great enthuse, only place so far, Partisan and Evergreen both so far put him down. I left his whole manuscript with Spender in London for Encounter, who I think just lost it. Also gave a reading for 25 poetry types at Oxford—read pieces from everybody and they picked up, like at Reed [College].
So anyway that’s the sum of me right now, not much, wish there were some Buddhists here to get drunk with. What your plans, you have any yet? Regards to anybody I know if you see them, Rexroth, Neal, etc. Tonight I go to movies see Rosselini’s St. Francis picture, never saw it in States. Saw Chaplin’s King in NY—did you in Japan? I hear you’ve been everywhere from Ras Tamara (wherever that mighty name belongs to) to Okinawa, including Bombay—run into anything or anybody fiery or flippy? Or floop? Even. Flow! Write, I did write you—about 2 big letters they’re lost in the Pacific somewhere—all about Fra Angelico and the cocks of Florence—oh yes, got high in the Forum at Rome, and climbed afoot Vesuvio and walked down 12 mi. to Pompeii, I saw a lot of classical Europe got all hung up on painting for the first time—and also saw huge exhibits of the greatest all time painter I decided, Van Gogh—in Amsterdam—like a museum with 150 Van Goghs all at once. Plenty weed here, also lots of cheap excellent high quality heroin, sniffed an enormous amount and stopped when Burroughs came to town—he’s kicked completely for the last 2 or 3 years after being on for a decade—so you see his whole scheme of things has changed a lot, “I’ve told no one to wait for me” he saith, quoting Perse. Had here, myself, a nice enlightened doll of an Indonesian girl was making it with, ach, but she found someone else last month—but anyway realized the future world’s going to be colored yellow or brownish after everybody winds up all intermarried and happy—never really realized that before. Wrote one nice line over English Channel “the giant sun ray down from a vast cloud sun light’s endless ladders streaming in eternity to ants in the myriad fields of England bearing minute gold thru smoke climbing unto heaven over London.”
As ever,
Allen
Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to Eugene Brooks [New York, NY] ca. April 20, 1958
Dear Gene:
Received the check—that was very rapid, I wrote and asked Nick Orlovsky for the money only about a week ago. Thanks for the extra $25. The money was repayment of money I’d loaned them for lawyer’s fee to get Nick out of bughouse. Looks like it all worked smoothly and well, and nothing lost but a little time for that particular good deed. Kind of renews your faith etc. etc. and Kerouac’s all paid up. So out of loans outlays etc. I’ve only lost 10 or 20 dollars out of my original pile. Also this week received $180 dollars from City Lights, royalties on last thousands sold. They printed up another 5000 copies (now 15,000) in all practically a best seller, so there’s more due, enough to get fare home this summer I guess, plus a small bankroll for NY. I can also make some (not much) money reading in NYC so won’t be immediately hit by depression, bad scene in market research, shipping, etc.
Interested to hear your reaction to Subterraneans. Yes it is sui generis, tho it has roots in a tradition of Miller-Céline- Wolfe-Anderson etc. Its value seems to me to lie in that, he [Kerouac] trying to find new personal intimate direct mode of expression. It’s obvious he has a lot of foolishness and idiot in him and psychological hang-ups like anyone, but he doesn’t try to revise them out, hide them or make an objective phony facade—you really are in contact with a man himself—that’s an interesting development—and it affects the prose. The sentences sound like someone talking long and excited all night telling an immense personal anecdote—with interruptions, additions, halts, stops, confusions, confessions, strangeness. It’s not his best writing (a relatively weak book compared to Dr. Sax and others unpublished) but it is unmistakably real and his own and in time. Lou’s reaction, he read and put it down, lost interest, “mutilated in its English, wretched abominable English sentence structure that makes a hodgepodge and mishmash” ... “wreck of English language.” “I’d flunk any pupil of mine who mangled the language like that.” He has a new book due this fall, Dharma Bums—about hitchhike thru Northwest 2 years ago with Zen Buddhist friend Gary Snyder. I haven’t read it, it’s last year’s writing, Viking bringing it out. Those publishers will screw him up since they ignore the deeper solitary paeans of prose he wrote earlier like Dr. Sax—want to rush out books all out of chronological order to fit Beat Generation propaganda bullshit they’ve created themselves—it’s all mis-taken. (Taken wrong). However maybe Dharma Bums is solid. Sax is great like Melville’s Pierre.