I wrote Russia writers group and Warsaw. Doubt if Russia will bite hook, they’re puritanical and edgy about anything that doesn’t follow their idiot line —lately attacks on Rock & Roll. I wrote them a letter all about Rock & Roll poetry screw that up for them in advance. Warsaw is another matter, I wrote them too, and sent some books (as I did Moscow). I spoke to people who were in Warsaw, also to French littérateurs who attend international conferences etc. also to German avant-garde editors—there is a wild literary life raging in Warsaw now, things are comparatively free—only place behind the iron curtain where there is a large vocal hip minority—they get all English and U.S. papers and books there—a lot of literary life, above and underground—(It’s not visible anywhere in Moscow or Yugoslavia, etc. but it is out in open in Warsaw). Because of this weird situation it’s supposed to be the most jumping city in Europe now. Chances of my being invited to live there free by official group is good, if I wait around long enough. See, Gregory wrote long article in a Dutch mag the equivalent of Sat. Review, it was reprinted in Germany Beat Gen material has hit France, and there is a lot of cultural intercommunication. I have distinguished credentials already—read on BBC and that caused attention, etc. If I can swing Warsaw before summer will go there, waiting to hear. Meanwhile taking another England trip, invited to read (paid $20) some society—have to make a respectable appearance before Spender and Herbert Read to beat down opposition to uncensored tape of Howl to be broadcast over BBC. A part was already broadcast and well received in papers, they are even rebroadcasting it this week, or soon, but the Talks Dept. there is now engaged I’m told in a conspiracy to broadcast the whole thing uncut as I read it (weeping, wailing)—they stick their necks out. Gregory come to England with me this time probably, he also record. This is all sort of a ball. Well I’ll write later—be in England early May for a week or so then back here.

As ever, love

 

Allen

Allen Ginsberg [??] to Louis Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] ca. April 20, 1958

Dear Lou:

 

Can’t write much, have been preparing manuscript for an anthology Grove is bringing out of young poets 1948-1956, looking at old poems of mine & figuring what’s best. Will go to England around May I, give reading there for some small poetry group, $20 pay, Corso go along too for kicks maybe read or record for BBC. “Transmutation” is very good, that’s one of the best of your poems recently, I guess a lot of the material you’ve used before but here all adapted well together & has considerable power. 4th line cater I like 6th line also, 8th line, last 3 best & sharpest for me. Great you could do that on phone.

Happy that you found Corso’s book interesting. I was always really impressed by that lost watches too (and similar phrasing in other poems). It’s his particular weird gift—an almost surrealist phrasing that makes strange sense. The line means, as I understand it, in context, since he’s revisiting unhappy scene of garbage dirty ears loss poverty and sees the same poverty still there, tho he’s escaped it, when it’s image raises up to attack him (dirty ears aims a knife at me), he realizes he’s now free, escaped on the road of his own beauty desire thru time, time has passed, he’s no longer a kid involved with same ugly conditioning, he’s escaped free of the tragedy of lower east side, he’s aware of death & time, he no longer attacks back with a vicious gun or knife, but pumps him full of lost watches—lost watches being time gone by, realization of mortality, old forgotten contemplations (as the hours of watches on ships)—while Dirty Ears, still caught in the environment, doesn’t realize the immense change—the lost watches, then, basically, as human consciousness—achieved by Gregory, denied alas to Dirty Ears who’s still hung up. What I like about that is the language and images—the most unpoetic, garbage cans, lower east side realities, Dirty Ears, stairways, hand on gat (fantasy of returning a big Italian successful heroic hoodlum—which he is, hoodlum of poesy)—all so realistic, and yet thru strange combinations capable of expressing very lucid and eternal thoughts. That’s really making poetry of everyday life, the strangeness of the commonplace, writing about real things. He has a peculiar imaginative second-sight. There’s another example in the poem “Italian Extravaganza” —the weird almost frightening beauty of “small purplish wrinkled head”—followed by the last two lines, comparison of the small coffin, a cause so small & real, and the 10 immense black Cadillacs of sorrow, almost pathetic the great display from the funeral home. Yet all done without abstraction, in simple images.

In the poem “Coit Tower,” the language is at its most imaginative—the situation is here he, the poet Gregory who was in jail in youth, is looking down on Alcatraz from a hill: “And I cried there in your dumb hollows O tower (Coit tower up on Telegraph Hill) clutching my Pan’s foot (imagination, life, & consciousness & experience) with vivid hoard of Dannemora”—that seems a line worthy of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill. (Dannemora Gregory’s prison). I’ve cried reading that, his grief & understanding seem so great (underneath his facade of childish egotism).

The sun poem is an experiment at pure wild images without direct sense, just fantastic combinations—they do make a kind of mystic sense actually, since the mind has its own secret language, as in dreams, we’re not always aware of the significance of certain compelling phrases—from another poem there is the line “Rose is my wise chair of bombed houses”—which I don’t at all understand—but it’s a line that haunts me like some of Kubla Khanish mysticdoms. That’s poetry. It takes a weird gift to imagine up a wise chair in a bombed house.... Spring started here too, a few trees in flower tho it’s been chilly last week—I have a cold. Re Jack’s prose, well I like it of course, my reason being that it has the same syntactical structure of fast excited spoken talking—this is an interesting event in prose development, and it’s no less communicative to me than heard speech, mine, yours, his,—when you speak you also talk a little like that, especially when you’re moved, excited, angry, or dizzy with happiness etc. etc.—heightened speech in other words. Normal conversation does not necessarily follow formal syntax, nor need it as long as it’s communicative. So written prose. Perhaps you find it uncommunicated or uncommunicating because you expect to see a different written order of syntax. But it actually gets across very well, what he’s describing, faithful to his own way of talk. It’s obvious from On Road or Town & City that he can write normal prose, simple & straightforward. So if he writes experimentally one has to give credit for it being you know at least sincere & even intelligent, an approach, a try—most people don’t even try—and it isn’t as if he hasn’t personally sacrificed a lot to pursue his sense of craft—that book was written long ago without a hope of publication—as On the Road was written 8 years ago. I do find it interesting though—I know the girl he writes about—who took off her clothes & flipped—I heard her story about it—that was the way she spoke, the syntax even, her style of speaking—a very common style—he’s caught her very well—and if you add his interpolations & private thoughts which he records semi-simultaneously with her monologues, & their conversation—you have a very complicated but very real structure of events to try and get down on paper. Hemingway tried simplification & reduction (and was attacked for being too inhumanly stripped down)—Jack trying (as Proust & Céline) to include all the little private thoughts you normally wouldn’t mention—so he arrives at a complicated sentence structure. It’s not trying to be English sentence structure. It’s trying to be American actual speech—and thought—reproduction. So it shouldn’t be judged by standards of a high school or college grammar course. It’s not meant to be grammatical that way, it’s meant to be right another way. Nor can one say that standard English syntax is the fixed and only standard way of transcribing human thought—all languages have different syntax structures—the Latin ones are one group—the German type inflected is another—and many primitive cultures have approaches to syntax that are almost almost incomprehensible to us (but make perfect sense to them —no verbs for instance in some languages, no adjectives in others). And there is Chinese syntax which I’m told is of a totally different order from ours. Syntax is only a tool to speak with, there are many syntaxes, & many variations possible to our tongue, common in use even, in talk—English grammar is only the formal way tied to fixed habits of feeling & communication—Jack, broken free of these fixed habits of thought, has to think & write his own way, find a mode. Look at the sentence I just wrote—it’s crazy, but it followed the spontaneous convolutions of my thought very flexibly—would I change my thought to fit the sentence structure better, or alter my thought & pare it down neat & leave out the hesitations, changes, and halts, interruptions, to make it fit a school copybook? I’d wind up writing gibberish if I tried to halt in midstream & box it up neat to fit some imaginary standard. The ideal is for me a sensitive prose or poetry syntax or metric that is practical & follows the changes actually going on in the process of thinking or writing—where a normal metric or syntax works, fine—but where it doesn’t apply, why? I no longer worry about that so much—just go my way—that’s all any man can do—live—and do what he thinks practical. And real. See now that that last bit, and real, added on to the sentence. I thought it up next and added it—you can follow my actual process of composition—what I mean is there directly no less and no more—I just thought to say, and real, and added it in, just like that. What freedom—and why not? Language is to use not dictate our thoughts. But so much of our lives & feelings are tied down to the limitations of what we’re taught—this is the importance of striking out into variation & experiment—this is not nihilism but courage—not really that—Joy! Well I’ll end on elevated note. Love to everybody—wrote Gene tonite—will try Warsaw yet see under skirt of iron curtain perhaps. There is no Beat Generation, it’s all a journalist hex.

Love

 

Allen

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to Hannah Litzky (Ginsberg’s aunt) [NJ?] June 20, 1958

 

Dear Hannah:

 

Making plans to return—hope to be back next month sometime, tho how and when I haven’t figured yet, but so anyway I guess I’ll see you soon. Spent a kind of gloomy uneasy winter not doing much but sightseeing in the rain and writing a little but since spring the city has opened out a little and I just gave up writing schedules and wander out every day now with friends here, go to parks, drink wine and coffee in outdoor cafés, St. Germain mostly, goof around all day and evening, write letters and poetry when I feel like, meet Frenchmen. If I stayed here another year I guess my French would be good enough to get around more socially—I’m just beginning to come into contact with literary types here—also with a strange young Rothschild heir who takes us (Corso me and Burroughs) riding to expensive nightclubs (us still in spotted rags) up the Champs Elysées. So far mostly have been hanging around with Americans mostly. We all live in the same hotel, others (a tall bearded motorcyclist method actor Brando type fellow from LA) around the corner—I have a large room and do the cooking, Burroughs and Gregory or whoever supplies the gelt when I’m (as usual) broke—so there’s always people around, I don’t actually have too much time alone, in fact beginning to develop a taste for solitariness and long hours staring at the ceiling just emptying my mind of junk. Sort of a floating existence, I’ll be glad to get home and settle down for a year.

If you see Saltman—Is he still working for NJ Parole or does he know anyone on it? Tell him, I’ve been getting some letters from (and answering them) a fellow name Raymond Bremser—who’s been in Bordentown Reformatory for 4 years and has another 22 months to go (armed robbery when he was 18)—writes extremely hopeful energetic wild poetry, definitely a gifted individual—he shouldn’t be hanging around Bordentown Reformatory. Saltman ever run into him? I’ll show Eli his letters when I get back. In fact I sent him some care of you a few months ago, misaddressed, and it returned here to me. But I get vast 30 page poems from Bremser that sound like jazzy awkward Hart Crane dithyrambs—very sweet and religious nature—tho rather scared (of where he is) and hiding his light under prison shades. He just sent me a letter with poems out of the blue a year ago, bold trust.

Went watching mobs parade against end of 4th republic a month ago—reminded me of days in Journal Square with Milgram. Otherwise, except for cops, street-life is normal and in fact indifferent to the whole political scene. The honest people here have all given up, powerless, tho DeGaulle sounds like he’s trying to order a basically contradictory and insoluble problem. The Algerian poets here say, “but, man, we’re not French—when are these squares going to get it thru their heads?” or words to that effect, in French. But had a vision of prewar Europe, with all the putsch excitement.

Lou says some of your students write papers on Beat Generation material. Alas, the whole scene is strictly a literary scene, basically, with technical literary practical meanings (shifts in prosody of verse and experiments and progress in prose forms)—and most of the great manuscript are still unpublished and will be for 10 years or more (like in 1910 with Pound, Joyce, Williams, etc.)—most of the sociological generalizations and middleclass publicity discussions (“What does beat mean? is it positive or negative? why do they steal hubcaps?) are false issues created by journalistic minds, hung up with meaningless habitual categories that just do not fit and never have been the concern of artistic (or spiritual) creation, i.e. square.

If you’re interested in the origin of the phrase (and it’s actual context and actual meaning) it was a word Huncke used to use, or we used to use about Huncke, to describe the peculiar physical and spiritual depression he used to get into—typical of a junkie (heroin addict, not marijuana which is harmless) —during and after which he (Huncke) used to experience a kind of religious illumination—that is being beat down to his naked human core (similar in a sense to the experience of the Dark Night of the Soul described by St. John of the Cross—or any classical mystic—or for that matter any psychoanalyst in describing the anxiety and depression that precedes a flood of basic insight) he had his soul sort of cracked open to admit the light. I’m using Huncke as an example, tho I think he’s the archetypical beat type. But actually, later, I think Kerouac walking down the street digging a ragged skeletal but illuminated junky girl we knew (a painter named Iris Brody³⁵) looked at her amazed and said, very casually, off remark—“This isn’t a lost generation it’s a beat generation.” The remark was picked up (by a writer named Holmes) and made the title of an article long ago in the Times and it spread there from. But so you see there isn’t any beat generation, there’s only a casual remark and a lot of journalists trying to make money by writing articles about sociology. That’s why there’s so much misunderstanding of the word, and overplaying of it, it’s ridiculous. It’s meaningless out of context—or has any meaning you want to give it, all equally arbitrary. And publishers use it to sell books, or TV interviewers use it to peg Kerouac (simple journalistic device) and sociologists use it to promote career by editing anthologies (good gimmick)—but that’s not art —and it’s not hip, and definitely not “beat.” So where are you? a great mass of literature, mostly unpublished... and a greater mass of misunderstanding. Like, there is not one reviewer of Kerouac who has noticed the basis of his prose nor the basis of structure in his writings (spontaneous unrevised prose and structure automatically rising out of the natural series of associations on a subject, without attempt to follow any other order than what passes thru his mind in recollection.) But all of them are worried about, and talk endlessly about, whether he’s serious or not, and whether he has moral concerns, and whether he steals hubcaps, or whatever. This may sound like a rather technical pre-occupation but actually most of our preoccupations are in this sense technical. So nobody really knows what we’re doing and an endless stream of bullshit flows thru Time and Commentary, etc. authored by ignorant sellouts who have absolutely no artistic insight or interests and are writing silly college debate society arguments for money attacking us for nihilism. I don’t know if you (or they for that matter) realize the real corruption of the intellectual community in U.S. and the trashy commercial level it operates on. Kerouac a victim, rather tired, of that now—his publishers avoiding all his later mellow golden immense works (Dr. Sax, Visions of Neal) (and his vast series of poems) (and a life of Buddha) (and a book of prayers and meditations—500 single-spaced pages) and playing him for the Beat Scene. The point is however the works are written, tho unknown, Burroughs’s also, unpublishable in U.S. for censorship reasons, my own later poetry ditto,—a whole raft of poets unacceptable for commercial reasons in NY—so this if anything is what is Beat. The illumination is there (the classics are written) despite the dark night of the soul in America, the illumination is intact in the poets and lovers—which was the message of Whitman. And Melville writing Billy Budd in solitude of his failure attic. That was “beat.” So you see the question of positive or negative values is not relevant. It is the questioner who’s a lost idiot, not poor beat saint, who knows (trembling) GOD. No less. Ancient Hasidim Rabbi would weep and agree. High school students and teachers, BEWARE! (End with diabolic crazes laughter and fadeout to dark rainy streets of Paris, gargoyles atop Notre Dame) ... can show this page to interested students but don’t forget the mad beware. Love, see you in a month.

As ever,

 

Allen

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to Jack Kerouac [n.p.] June 26, 1958

 

Dear Jack:

 

Wrote you last month, no answer, are you mad at me? Write honey I’m full of snow right now, strange interesting rich acquaintances here, one a young Rothschild junior Burroughs, he and Bill will go to India someday together, I’ll —somebody, another blonde young millionaire just brought up some old suits, Bill now smoking Green [marijuana] all drest in distinguished Averill Harriman black worsted flannel, thin, graying temples: he brought me my first suit in years, fine English grey wool, last a thousand winters—but later—Alas Alas Jack I got final word from LaVigne today, long letter, Neal is in jail, LaVigne not seen him, talked to Carolyn on phone to find out for me and wrote me—he’s in San Bruno County jail, waiting trial, “Two facts are 1) that he was arrested selling to narco agents, has been tied (mistakenly) into series of other arrests as source of supply (since he comes up in trains from south), there is a long list of charges against him (tho Carolyn didn’t enumerate them), 2) that he is discovered as Dean M. of On the Road by the fuzz.” That’s what LaVigne says Carolyn says, though I doubt the latter means anything, maybe just her paranoia. Tho I hear scene in SF is very bad, saw a girl from there who showed me evil Herb Caen column innuendos about marijuana smoke stronger than garlic these days on North Beach, anyone can pick up Columbus and Bway, fuzz is all over on account of all the publicity, city officials cracking down, The Place raided, and its balcony use forbidden and only 35 people at time allowed in LaVigne was having a show there and they ordered him off balcony—some guy name Paul Hansen fall off a building last Sunday, and finally skull struck again, Connie Sublette was strangled last “Tuesday AM by a spade seaman who confessed that PM.” I met someone here 2 months ago that knew her said she had a codeine habit and was slightly crazy, calling cops to arrest people, I don’t know what—long saga of drunken week following her around feuding with some evil tea heads or something, I don’t know. Haven’t heard anything of Sublette, I guess he’s ok—in jail I had heard for a burglary.... everything I hear from there sounds evil... except letters from Gary who’s in hospital for ball operation, and Wieners who’s living at Wentley with LaVigne, they’re friends now, I guess I think even making it...but what to do about Neal—I wanted to write Carolyn, don’t any longer have address on Bancroft, got letter back—LaVigne forgot to send it—you have it? I’ll try write him in jail—Carolyn added that she thought he’d get 2-5 yrs maybe—god knows what he’s thinking—I had a shuddery premonition, thought he was committing suicide, yesterday when hi, suddenly thought of him maybe in jail, then got this letter today. But little doomed Connie is sad.

I’m coming back to New York in a few weeks, hope to leave here, have to get up the fare but that’ll come, or else family said they’d send it if no other way. Gregory and I interviewed by Buchwald, Art, silly interview, he tried to be sympathetic but we were drunk and kookie, but next night I sent him big serious prophetic godly letter, said maybe he’d publish that, and Gregory will send him another Luciferian sweet one—but at end of article he said we were trying to raise fare, I was, for return, maybe someone send it. Long letters from Peter, he OK, you see him? His brother Julius strangely better, will get pass to leave weekends, no more mad sneakings into grey halls with stolen keys, he talks and reads to Peter a little—P discovered in bathroom he eats his shit off fingernails after washing with hand—“what am I getting in to” says Peter—I dunno, I come back, hope for best. “Allen, now Julius’ shit is in my mouth and yours,” says P.

Paris Review, Nelson Aldrich, came weeks ago, asked for Burroughs manuscript, I gave him County Clerk and some others he said he’d try to publish, also gave him my Lion poem, Peter show you that? and Gregory gave him Atom Bomb poem and I typed out his selection from your scroll—Choruses #19, 112, 126, 226, 228, and 240—a nice round selection with the magnificent sonnet “Love’s multitudinous boneyard” (It’s got end couplet Shakespearian like sonnet). Is this OK by you—they want some prose from you—send if can to Nelson Aldrich at Paris Review—send parts of Visions or wild prose from Sax —that a good way to get Sax going into world—I think they’ll take all—crazy selection, the best so far in one magazine—but if they don’t take the County Clerk or something of Bill’s we’ll take back our poems—OK? Let me know if these poems are OK to give them—Bill and I all dressed up alone in room here, drawing of Horn and Hardart by Peter taped on mirror, we’re sniffing coke, I’m high now, so trying to write on this, never did before—lovely feeling, like benny a little, and last longer than I thought—keep sniffing every so often you can stay happy for whole hour, just came down before and starting up again—haven’t had any since Norman-Vicki 1949 or 48 rooms or was 47?

But is there anything we can do about Neal? Character witnesses—he’ll be all alone only haggard Carolyn probably angry at him, Gary’s in hospital can’t find out anything, he’s wise enough to know if anything to do, no one to write to there who could help—thought maybe Ruth Witt-Diamant or Rexroth, just some letters that he’s a writer or something, say—he being crucified, evil laws on T, trapped by decoy cops, all nothing for him to suffer for—and probably big mistaken spider web paranoias by cops—though I guess maybe he’s having some peace and have plenty time to meditate and stay way from horses and RR and T and Carolyn and house and his life, forced vacation, maybe blessing in disguise and he grim and peaceful in jail, or writing prayers to Saturn, maybe he write again, die, I’ll stay in NY-Paterson-Long Island Eugene’s, wherever, a year, maybe Peter get Veterans apartment in Bronx—have endless notes, poems, to type, finish Fall of America poem, maybe, Bible Jeremiah book, China have billion people by 2000, we’ll see it, be industrialized as much as England in 14 years I read, must call for Holy America make it on beat angel soul promote Walt [Whitman] comrade to Budh ambassador—otherwise maybe paranoia machine sink down on us from new Asia—we may be visionary island America after all—still interested in Democratic Vistas, he says if we don’t produce bards and spiritual America and if materialism greed takes over we be “the fabled damned among nations”—can see it happening from year and half in Europe, from Europe,—yes I see the vast virtues but family Sunday house with eternal TV like T&C solidity strength—even that and spume in history waves—white race too small—smooth metallic faced chinamen in space suits maybe go to Mars-Burroughs horrified by all tales of communist dullness, we hear here in Paris from travelers, shot all hop smokers in China etc. etc.—now T is banned (legally and slightly enforced) in Tangier (Arabs have to hide their pipes under table in cafes now)—so America got to be peaceful wiseman among nations, and survive—maybe take vow of poverty and give away empire state bldg possessions to India—I dunno, just a gleam —Melville and Whitman both worried about albionic Jerusalemic prophetic America—our? are you beyond that? magic dream of ladies moving in advertisements. Well, that’s what’s happening outside, I read it in papers, I mean about politics China, see police in streets here—we were all here thru 1936 headlines about dogauullep—I saw my mama and Aunt Elanor marching huge street crowded with Naomi and Maxes, didn’t know what they were doing, a month ago, vast mob rally against DeGaulle, Gregory and John Balf who’s like a student calm DuPeru—we climbed on the ledge of a bank on Place Republique and watched the thousand headed streets walk—chain of organized (communists? or anyone) joining arms to prevent crowd from advancing further—and down the block, suddenly glimpsed, waiting, a “hoard of silver helmets” Gregory said, cops waiting to break riots—but the crowd never transgressed and people said it was nothing to compare to the great aroused weeping mobs of half a million 1938. Went just now with Harry Phipps (Marshall Field daughter grandson something blonde boy 24 writes Copelandesque jazz) to his big apartment and wife with Bill and Greg on Baudelaire’s nearby Notre Dame Isle St. Louis, house Voltaire and Chopin lived in—Gregory sat at Chopin’s piany—next door a big party—Elsa Maxwell—we didn’t go in, peeked thru keyhole to see vast candelabra red rugged hall lights, vast tables for Princes—so big a party a map of table seats at door made by LaVigne artist—we went to Phipps next door, met his wife, she went for cucumbers and he pulled delicate enamel box of snow (other day Harry I’d had from same box in bathroom of Club St. Germain—he’d took me—heard Kenny Clarke and Sonny Clarke had been in my room 2 months ago talking interminable junktalk to Bill, me and BJ and Gregory drunk arguing and hinctying in front of my room-kitchen table, where he sat with Bill, audience, we stood up fronta them and they talked serious we enthused by 12 people in room put on play me asking BJ to give me his life, he with big beard saying yes, but, Gregory drunkest rolling around us encouraging Clarke and Bill to listen—I explaining my prosody lines to Clarke asking him if it’s like his drums—he told me come down free to St. Germain—I never went—till Phipps took me (Phipps a friend, went to India with Rothschildic Jacques Stern, 25 yr old, crippled, braces on poliac thin hips and feet, one crutch aluminum, I carry his 95 pounds oft upstairs 4 flights to my room so he see Bill) (all the latter is Stern whom I’ll describe)—Phipps took me to hear great excitement jazz with Clarke and Bill—everybody on Harry in Paris busted, including Clarke, great raids everywhere—he playing that night suddenly shaved headed and I beard sick—he waved at me after 2 months—high later that night after can visit with enamel junk box, talked with narcissus Yale strange boy blond Phipps, he told me he made it with Jimmy Dean, had backed his first show, fell in love with Dean lounging openbreast and feet outstretched in chairs—screwed Dean and blew each other, Dean no screw him. (Door just knocked, I got it locked so I can keep private 3 AM feed of coke and write you letter.) You ever get a coke letter before? Dear Jack, you love me still, I love you, don’t be mad I make long remark last time and about mother— that why you no answer? Bill say not to, he say it’s meaningless to make such generalizations, i.e. even if true you know anyway accept or reject on one level or other, such insights, psychoanalytic, naive of me to think they have emotional meaning anyway to you—but was I wrong—I old ami trying to talk to you Lucienesque d la Carr—as we might dig Neal apattern from afar—tho his I can’t fathom-anyway door knock, just turned away Arab acquaintance Bouraba, wrote 7 novels in Arabic, from Algiers, sensitive Arabic even Bill thinks is good intentioned, one maybe translated I dunno in French—wanders around Paris no place to sleep slept here last nite—I wanted to be alone with Coke Jack—said was typing. He showed me his wet shoulders from rain and said “mais in tout cas mieux que vous travillez sans distraction.” I said “Pardon, c’est vrai—a bientot.” My room like a RR station, we all get up different times, Bill now unaccustomable 1 PM for tea bread breakfast, Greg wakes 10 or earlier and don’t eat breakfast but writes types or walks—he has little green (8 mille) attic room upstairs last week he asked Jacques Stern for sudden $50 for rent etc. and Jacques peeled it off his daily junk-taxi-chauffeur-Tour D’argent roll—I get up noon mostly, talk to Bill 1-3 PM, walk out with Gregory, Bill goes in late afternoon to buy paregoric (he has 2 oz. small habit) or see analyst. I shop at 5 and cook we all eat early—7PM-8 or 9—we go out to St. Germain for coffee maybe all, with BJ or anyone else who comes over, sometimes 5 people, I come back at 10 maybe and type letters, rarely write with empty mind, don’t write much poetry, sometimes scrawl notes in new green notebook and leave them, have a lot now. Anyway, just got back from Phipps house visit first time all three of us—first time know rich—he came as I said, earlier to bring us his old suits—one for each of us—Bill looks like great sober Palm Beach chess player private genius in his new black flannel suit, fits him exact—saw him framed tonight in huge 18th Century drawing room, his hair thin, he thin (PG) and retired, making speedy psychic gestures with his palms, stiff armed junky explanation gestures, of some scientific theory of chess—probability, and horserace betting, indifferent to vast Elsa alas Maxwell Party actually going on next door (shades Kingsland). Jacques Stern, I haven’t explained, Gregory heard of him at Harvard, a rich young Frenchman—crutches, 95 lb., polio—had read On Road, Gasoline, Howl, Junkie (not realizing the latter was Bill)—he writes, prose, very good, not totally mad, but amazing, so desirous of explaining soul of dead Peter la Nice, fellow 20 yr old junkie with Alan Eager, who died, Stern says he was his saint (Peter)—studied, like Bill, anthropology at Harvard, like Bill, descended from noble (Rothschild) Jewish strange huge Champs Elysées apartment—like Bill, an endless experimental junkie, had same kafkian idea of junk as Bill—writes prose like Bill’s anthropological images of Yage City—also lived in India with guru 14 months—going back next fall (wants to go with Bill) Like Bill, being psychoanalyzed by multilingual famous analyst in Paris—he was sick, we went to his vast apartment, his tall sexy lovely wife hates us, he lay in bed junksick (everybody busted) reading Bill’s manuscript—he loves Bill and says he’s the great teacher—reading me Tristan Tzara dada poesy too—lay in bed thin and pale and ashen, huge room, butlers outside door, told us go to library get licker—rolls joints—drove us in huge chauffeur 50 foot convertible, cream, top down (Gregory asked that) up Champs Elysées—immense intellectual knowledge, years in polio bed reading Pareto and Roman history and anthropology and Spengler—wants to be saint—said in India, with guru, meditated daily 10 hours—reached what he thought was nirvanic void—would stay there 2 hrs—suddenly evil voices Why! Why! began creeping in void, his guru told him he was Not Ready, and sent him away—yesterday he came to hotel—he too finally busted by cops for possession, they came and questioned him at 8 AM in his huge ruggy bedroom, 5 hours in the library with them, he big black sheep for years, may go jail, short term 2 mo., probably not, just fine and expensive doctors and lawyers testimony—he wanted to know from Gregory if jail was necessary spiritually for him—we told him no anyway poor cripple—Like Bill (this year) he gave up sex, indifferent, tho he has this solid Ava Gardner wife who digs him, loves him, and 3 year old baby, or 4, boy—never saw kid, in nursery of vast duplex apartment.—His friend buddy millionaire boy, went to India with last time, Harry Phipps, who came by tonight for us with old clothes and cocaine. Bill digs Stern, his mind, factual information, on junk and on anthro, and advanced experimental thoughts on brainwashing and evil—so suddenly Paris getting interesting, Stern knows Dali and Cocteau aristocracy types, bored, wants Corsoesque Romantic Age—but I want to come home, have no fare, wondering where it will come from—got to come in next two weeks or I hide in Rotterdam looking for ship free workaway—almost might ask Stern or narcissusist Phipps but don’t want to don’t know them yet besides my father offered it if no other jokefate gold appears. Will send a batch poems to Botthege Oscura and elsewhere and try collect $30 each, should work. Gregory might come back, but scared of cops and doesn’t think anyone needs wants loves him there anyway, so would as well go to India—tho when the other day I told him I wished he’d come home—thought how beautiful he would be a great known poet in NY, with Fried Shoes and H Bomb wrapped in Ermine with mustache of Gold, I want to eat your Boom, etc.—he seemed moved he said, nobody asked him to come back before. He’s homeless, Bill is another matter, he says “I have told nobody to wait,” or “I have told no one to wait” and seeing him suddenly look old, I added “Not even my body.” He wants to finish analysis here in a few months, then no plans—he’s long gone from interest in sex me loveboy—tonight in his black suit in his room he looked so lone I kissed him all over his cheeks goodnight, he smiled impassive and shy as if in Asia, and bowed me out goodnight—then after, maybe with Stern in fall, go to India. Just sniffed last of my pile of coke,—about 20 nostrils-full all today since 5 PM—no tzinging noises around ceiling and walls—just a sustained energy and want-to-talk.

Well, yesterday Art Buchwald, we were looped, I see not much gets across in interview that way, tho he was simpatico, I wrote him serious prose poem letter last nite for his column—I see what you had to go through, wish I’d been there, I feel now too tired tongue stricken to blow, afresh, when I get home, my virgin kicks and energy and sense of mission like I had with Gary in Northwest, or earlier in SF, seems gone—nothing new to say, repeat poetry novelties—wonder how I’ll do in NY and if I’ll have to do anything wild—don’t even feel like reading, Howl, can’t even make ecstatic tape in soundproof French Vogue studio room, tho I’ve been paid $50 advance on it, can’t make it right now, maybe in Newman’s studio in NY can get drunk—make last weep record. Help me. What you do—I heard your record (records?) out—Steve Allen? Tho not heard anything about it. Enclosed find letter from Terry Southern, friend of Mason, wrote pointless tho hip N. West book [Flash and Filigree] published by your Deutsch in England—perhaps you can answer him—I’ll write him that queer sections, some libel characters, and whole scroll long syntax of On Road was tampered with by Viking—they take out any tea? I seem to remember they broke up prose a lot to shorter sentences often and disturbed the benny flow. He (Southern) seems well meaning and interested in prose and took trouble to write and investigate and so I feel like answering information-ally. You seen review of Road from England Times and Observer? One (John Wain) quoted both of us at length attacking etc.

Buchwald said he’d introduce us (and Bill especially) to John Huston who’s here, making picture. Bill has idea for Tangier panorama film (episodes seen thru eyes of bill-junky looking for drugstore sick on Ramadan holiday, street boy looking for a score from fag, effeminate tourist with mother), town seen thru different Burroughs eyes, juxtaposed. Or maybe Greg and I make travel loot in bit-parts—or maybe just watch Huston Burroughs talk.

Lentil soup and Bayonne hambone on stove, blue dawn rainy cloudy sky all week, coke descending, been grinding my teeth all night, cat’s on bed washing his breast, grey calm cat Bill no longer torments at all, why don’t you write me love letter, you ashamed of me I don’t write enough or not sufficiently entered void ready for death? Ah Jack, are you tired—you have been writing long solitudenous halo for Sax? I’ll be home in NY see you within a month, lets meet like angels and be innocent, what are you brooding about in Long Island, hold my hand, I want to see Lucien again and shade of Rubenstein and London Towers and 43, 1943, our walk by 119th St. to Theological Seminary when I told you about saying farewell to Lucien’s and my door on 7th floor and adieu prayer to stairway there, is not Sebastian faithful to the end? [...]

Goodnight,

Allen

 

 

 

[After receiving the news that Cassady had been arrested, Ginsberg wrote to him immediately offering to help in any way he could.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to Neal Cassady [San Bruno, CA] July 7, 1958

Dear Neal:

 

I hear you’re in San Bruno County Jail, so taking a chance with this note in hope it will reach you. I’d have written before but had lost your Los Gatos address. How are you—what’s happened? I got letter from LaVigne telling me news of you and North Beach. Neal, Neal hello, write me. I leave here in 10 days and return home to join Peter in New York—everything’s ok here, Bill’s with me in same hotel. We met young 24 year old genius millionaire, digs Bill, same kicks as Bill, anthropology and Harvard and horses you know—they’ll go to India, this young Frenchman and Bill (he’s married a beauty and has kid)—he’s crippled and thin angel, polio—a Rothschild—writes—and he’ll set up a big house for us to join them, outside Calcutta—study Yoga and meet the Sages of India at last (he been there 14 months a year ago). So next year after a year home I will head Far East with Peter I hope. But only fragmentary news of your difficulties reached here—tell Carolyn to write me if you can’t, with details, and what future looks like and what family situation is, and what arrangements have been made for house, etc. Is there anything I can do, I mean get together any character references or witnesses—Witt-Diamant from State College or whoever I can arrange for, I don’t know if that’s any help? I will be in NY around the 25th of this month—if there’s anything I can do on the spot tell me and I’ll come out there and be what help I can. I have no idea of the situation. I wrote Gary Snyder, he’s the only one with strong sense (he’s in hospital for operation right now) to find out the score and find what need be done. [...] Bill sends his love, Gregory sends his, he left yesterday for trip to bullfight fiesta in Pamplona, Hemingway backwater—he’s glowing nowadays and very funny. We made an English trip together, read in Oxford, explored Soho head area. I guess you’re OK, hah? Bill you know lay alone in Tangier for half a year 1957 and finally meditating all afternoon alone in darkened room, for months, received his first perfect bliss, that is he says, he felt, after long despair, a new sense of “indifferent benevolent sentience at the center of things”—his first real faith. So came here to Paris to clear up early tangles in a last mop-up psychoanalysis. He’s changed a lot, very balanced, kind and gentle. Now even tender. His whole hang up with me completely disappeared, miraculously it was only a last ditch grab at some connection before godliness, now he’s alone with the Alone. Me, I have got too hung up with my identity as poet-power and after yearlong hassles with publicity and pulling wires of Beat behind scenes to get poetries published, got to give up again, and go be nobody again and regain my god calm prophecy feelings. Life here been frantic and second rate, everybody in my room all the time, I never get alone enough. But I’ve seen Tangier, Spain, Italy, Vienna, Munich, Paris, Amsterdam, London. Tomorrow night Bill and I go make visit to Céline, I spoke to him on phone, he has shy reticent young voice, almost quavering, very delicate voice and hesitates, no ogre. I said, “How lovely to hear your voice.” He said “anytime Tuesday after 4.” But I never got to Warsaw and Moscow, tho I tried.

What have you been doing all this time? I hardly could get news of you and asked everyone I wrote in SF, write me a note at least, here or to Paterson, when will we see each other again? Come fly over ocean at night and meet me in mid Atlantic sky in a dream—or I’ll arrive and hove in clouds over San Bruno shedding prayers in the moonbeams. Keep Neal—I’ll keep Allen as ever, write me.

Love

 

Allen

[That july, Ginsberg sailed for home. As soon as he could he wrote to his friends back in Paris to bring them up to date on events in New York.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Long Island, NY] to William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso [Paris, France] late July-early August 1958

 

Dear Bill: Gregory:

 

Been home a few days, nothing much spectacular happening, I’m out at my brother’s Levittown-type house in L.I. where nothing works, the chrome typewriter table rattles, dishwasher machine puffs steam and ties you down in the kitchen 45 minutes till it finished, walls are plasterboard so you can’t hang pictures or put up shades, all the sliding new-type closet doors have been off their rails for years, you can’t get them moving, none of the other door handles catch, sink has a special modern faucet you pull up handle instead of turn it, but the pull-up handle goes out of commission and you can only get scalding water, now my brother’s gone out Sunday to canvas neighborhood, collect Democratic votes for local district committeemen because he’s caught in middle of small town personality squabble between two irritable competing factions of ambitious Democratic politicians. He has to do this to get business as local lawyer and political appointment job later since it costs $10,000 a year to keep his household running, and it’s not even far enough out on L.I. to be out of bomb area.

Missed Peter at boat and had supper with Lucien, he had ulcer and quit drinking, he has house in country, his wife stays up there all week with three children, he stays here works, I was quiet, he says he has special pipeline to God, ain’t no rules in his religion except “You don’t mess with people” (he says that covers the ten commandments etc.), and his religion don’t allow no proselytizing either, it’s just for him, and his special pipeline (like in Arabia he says)—woke up one morning on 33rd birthday felt like he’d just been taken down off the cross—also his God don’t have nothing to do with human ideas about malevolence or benevolence—no special point to life except that if you get a special pipeline like him it’s pretty interesting, that is, life is at least interesting, but there is no moral. This his sermon to Jack, me, Peter, and a collection of UP drunkards at his house. Last night, before last

Found Peter next day and key to apartment on 87th on loan (87th and First) for a few weeks from friend Elise [Cowen] and went there and had long sweaty ball, and midnight woke up with strange feeling in my kidney I’d had all day and realized I was in line for a kidney stone attack, called up Dr. Perrone in Village, he phoned pharmacy, I sped down in taxicab and picked twelve Demerol tablets, so scored early after arrival. Took three and it killed the pain and knocked me out for the next day, gave some to Peter and Jack (to keep Kerouac from boozing). Saw him the next afternoon, down at Lucien’s, he seems a little wider, face and body, arm wrapped dirty poison ivy bandage, he was a little drunk and insisted on lifting up my brother (I want to lift the Ginsbergs) we took long walk around the Village, fragments of endless details about movie money (On Road sold for $25,000 to shysters who won’t pay up), interviews, says he don’t know what to write now. Yes, I got that letter from his mother you forwarded, he says he know about it, she read one of my letters (the long cocaine one) he says it don’t make any difference between us, but I suspect it does. He going to stay out in L.I. not see anyone all summer. I went out yesterday to Peter’s in Northport—turns out Jack lives two blocks away, Peter went over to fetch him out, I hid in bushes, Jack wouldn’t come out said he was afraid his mother would suspect, anyway “What good would it do?” whatever he meant by that—something Buddhist—so I went away feeling rather bad—so far can’t seem to reach him, emotionally—just shout maybe when drunk. He said he was restless in L.I. and wanted to get place somewhere else, I suspect his mother not happy there either, I don’t know, he stuck with her like wandering Kike.

We went to Don Allen’s, he said he’d look up you, Michaux book and find out about Céline latest book, he was interested in publishing both—also there’s a new Evergreen out with some Artaud and Jack’s essay on essentials of prose. Also told him about Stern’s book, have Jacques send him or me a copy, he was interested. Also said he was printing a poetry series and would publish everyone, Snyder and Whalen and Creeley, etc. Said the publishing scene is taking care of itself now, I think. Olson now digs my poetry and Whalen’s and recommended them publishing the Xbalba. Grove disaffected with Duncan and so is Olson—too much campy clique???, I gather (these last gossips for Gregory, not you, Bill)—Met Peter’s father, they’re living on 84th near Riverside in one room. After long talks, what we’ll do is get a pad in town, Peter leave his father to shift for self (says he can), and we settle down for unknown year ahead. Lafcadio in Northport will stay there and get job he says though he’s invited to stay with us—but he talks about seeing Mars rocket which swooped over Northport and signaled to him when he ran out of house in woods naked —they’re coming back get him, the one perfect man, to save him from the coming bomb apocalypse when the earth will go too near the sun “just like Mars came too near earth last year.” We gave him long frantic astronomy lesson all afternoon and he got it through his head about regular orbits of Mars etc. but there’s nothing much to say to him about spaceships rescuing him since says he waved to them and saw them. Altogether screwy. At same time painting a great deal—I bought his first oil for $10—a lone doll like adolescent (him) painted orange sitting at small round table dreaming and gazing at an empty chair with a wall opened in a window and writhing green Matisse-like vegetation entering the room. Odor of personal dreamy loneliness in the picture almost like a Balthus dream picture—he’s very good, and the colors varied and inventive, a natural talent. We bought him more oils and canvasses and what happens next don’t know. Meanwhile got to find a pad. Julius no great problem since if he’s well enough he can be brought home weekends tentatively; if not, not. Peter’s submerged in all that and seems glad to take my advice to disentangle where his help’s doing no good. Don Allen publishing one of his poems in the anthology too.

So that’s all I’ve done, seen Jack, Lucien, Peter, my family one day in Paterson, and now out here in L.I. with brother for Sunday. I’ll go into the city Monday and get X-rays for kidney stone possibilities—probably nothing permanent —meet Peter, go up to apartment on 87th and ball, sleep, and figure what next. Peter works nights. I haven’t sized up or contacted much of the literary entertainment world money scene and don’t know how real that is yet here actually, meanwhile trying to get part-time job dishwash or Gallup Poll research til I see what is up. I don’t know what I’m doing here except for Peter, I don’t understand Jack, the newspapers are too many to read and the cars roll by in the rain outside on the highway in L.I. Guess I’ll just settle down if can find an apartment and see what happens. [... ]

I’ll write as I go along. Not showed Jack his mother’s letter yet but he seems so ambivalent, I will next time. She’s mad and he seems to be picking it up. Says he’s a Republican. I don’t know what’s wrong. Nobody seems to be dependable but Peter, I’m going to analysis, if I can find one.

Skyline is stunning in the mist, when I came in—like all the spires and architecture and cathedrals of Europe all put together on one shelf and more massive height—you get a sense of eternity looking at Manhattan from a boat arriving—the buildings look as if they were manufacturing cosmic jazz. [...]

Love

 

Allen

[Ginsberg was always bothered by criticism from the academic world, but when his old classmate, John Hollander, began to criticize the Beat Generation in print, Allen wrote an epic-length letter in which he tried to set the record straight.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to John Hollander [New London, CT] September 7, 1958

 

Dear John:

 

Got your letter, slow answering since writing a little and invasion of people in apartment and too much mail, a lady in Michigan wanting to know if I believe in God, I have to answer everything, it’s difficult. No, of course, communication’s always there, why not, only a shit would be bugged, besides I’ve seen too much, I’m tired. It’s just that I’ve tried to do too much explaining and get overwhelmed by the vastness of the task, and sometimes what seems to be all the accumulated ill-will and evil vibrations in America (Kerouac got beaten up at the San Remo for his trouble in coming down there and making himself available.) But to begin somewhere, I should might begin with one thing, simple (I hate to go back to it over and over, like revolving around my corpse, the construction of Howl). This may be corny to you, my concern with that, but I’ve got to begin somewhere and perhaps differences of opinion between us can be resolved by looking at that. See, for years before that, thinking in Williams line, which I found very helpful and quite real for what it is doing, the balance by ear of short lines formed of relatively natural ordinary notebook or conversation speech. Xbalba is fragments of mostly prose, written in a Mexican school copybook, over half a year—then rereading, picking out the purest thoughts, stringing them together, arranging them in lines suitably balanced, mostly measured by the phrase, that is, one phrase a line—you know it’s hard to explain this because it’s like painting and unless you do it like practicing a piano, you don’t think in those terms and get the experience of trying to work that way, so you don’t notice all the specific tricks—that anyone who works in that field gets to be familiar with—that’s why I’m interested in Blackburn, Levertov, Creeley, Oppenheimer, all the Black [Mountain] lit people—they work steadily consistently trying to develop this line of goods, and each has a different interesting approach—they all stem out of Williams—but I can tell their lines apart they really are different just as you can tell the difference between styles and approaches of abstract painters. When you tell me it’s just a bore to you, that just cuts off communication, I mean I don’t know what to say, I get embarrassed to retreat and go about my work and stop explanations. Of course you may not be interested in this field of experiment, but that doesn’t mean it’s uninteresting to others, that it’s categorically a bore. I ALSO believe it’s the main “tradition,” not that there is any tradition except what we make ourselves. But basically I’m not interested in tradition because I’m more interested in what I’m a doing, what it’s inevitable for me to do. This realization has given me perspective on what a vast sad camp the whole literary-critical approach of school has been—basically no one has insight into poetry techniques except people who are exercising them. But I’m straying at random. But I’m now getting bugged at people setting themselves up as scholars and authorities and getting in the way of continuous creative work or its understanding or circulation —there is not one article on the Beat or SF scene yet that has not been (pro or con) invalidated (including yours) by the basic fact that the author is just a big windbag not knowing what he’s talking about—no technical background, no knowledge of the vast body of experimental work, published and unpublished (the unpublished is the best), no clear grasp of the various different schools of experiment all converging toward the same or similar end, all at once coming into intercommunication, no knowledge of the letters and conversations in between, not even the basic ability (like Podhoretz) to tell the difference between prosody and diction (as in his PR diatribes on spontaneous bop prosody confusing it with the use of hip talk not realizing it refers to rhythmical construction of phrases and sentences). I mean where am I going to begin a serious explanation if I have to deal with such unmitigated stupid ignorant ill willed inept vanity as that—someone like that wouldn’t listen unless you hit him over the head with a totally new universe, but he’s stuck in his own hideous world, I would try, but he scarcely has enough heart to hear)—etc. etc. —so all these objections about juvenile delinquency, vulgarity, lack of basic education, bad taste, etc. etc., no form, etc. I mean it’s impossible to discuss things like that—finally I get to see them as so basically wrong (unscientific) so dependent on ridiculous provincial schoolboy ambitions and presuppositions and so lacking contact with practical fact—that it seems a sort of plot almost, a kind of organized mob stupidity—the final camp of its announcing itself as a representative of value or civilization or taste—I mean I give up, that’s just too much fucking nasty brass. And you’re guilty of that too John, you’ve just got to drop it, and take me seriously, and listen to what I have to say. It doesn’t mean you have to agree, or change your career or your writing, or anything hideous, it just means you’ve got to have the heart and decency to take people seriously and not depend only on your own university experience for arbitrary standard of value to judge others by. It doesn’t mean you have to agree, that Free Verse is the Only Path of Prosodic Experiment, or that Williams is a Saint, or I have some horrible magic secret (tho god knows I have enough, this week with that damned Buddhist laughing gas, everybody has). Just enough to dig, you to dig, what others besides yourself are trying to do, and be interested in their work or not, but not get in the way, in fact even encourage where you can see some value. And you’re in a position to encourage, you teach, you shouldn’t hand down limited ideas to younger minds—that was the whole horror of Columbia, there just was nobody there (maybe except Weaver) who had a serious involvement with advanced work in poetry. Just a bunch of dilettantes. And THEY have the nerve to set themselves up as guardians of culture?!? Why it’s such a piece of effrontery—enough to make anyone paranoiac, it’s a miracle Jack or myself or anybody independent survived—tho god knows the toll in paranoia been high enough. All these grievances I’m pouring out to you. Well why revise.

Back to Howl: construction. After sick and tired of short line free verse as not expressionistic enough, not swinging enough, can’t develop a powerful enough rhythm, I simply turned aside, accidentally to writing part I of Howl, in solitude, diddling around with the form, thinking it couldn’t be published anyway (queer content my parents shouldn’t see etc.) also it was out of my shortline line. But what I did thought my theory, I changed my mind about “measure” while writing it. Part one uses repeated base who, as a sort of kithara BLANG, Homeric (in my imagination) to mark off each statement, each rhythmic unit. So that’s experiment with longer and shorter variations on a fixed base—the principle being, that each line has to be contained within the elastic of one breath—with suitable punctuatory expressions where the rhythm has built up enough so that I have to let off steam by building a longer climactic line in which there is a jazzy ride. All the ear I’ve ever developed goes into the balancing of those lines. The interesting moments when the rhythm is sufficiently powerfully pushing ahead so I can ride out free and drop the who key that holds it together. The method of keeping a long line still all poetic and not prosey is the concentration and compression of basically imagistic notations into surrealist or cubist phrasing, like hydrogen jukeboxes. Ideally anyway. Good example of this is Gregory’s great (I swear) Coit Tower ode. Lines have greater poetic density. But I tried to keep the language sufficiently dense in one way or another—use of primitive naive grammar (expelled for crazy), elimination of prosey articles and syntactical sawdust, juxtaposition of cubic style images, or hot rhythm. Well then Part II. Here the basic repeated word is Moloch. The long line is now broken up into component short phrases with ! rhythmical punctuation. The key repeat BLANG word is repeated internally in the line (basic rhythm sometimes emerging—/—) but the rhythm depends mostly on the internal Moloch repeat. Lines here lengthened—a sort of free verse prose poetry STANZA form invented or used here. This builds up to climax (Visions! Omens! Etc.) and then falls off in coda. Part III, perhaps an original invention (I thought so then but this type of thinking is vain and shallow anyway) to handling of long line (for the whole poem is an experiment in what you can do with the long line—the whole book is)—::: that is, a phrase base rhythm (I’m with you etc) followed as in litany by a response of the same length (Where you’re madder etc), then repeat of base over and over with the response elongating itself slowly, still contained within the olsstic of one breath —till the stanza (for it is a stanza form there, I’ve used variations of it since) building up like a pyramid, an emotion crying siren sound, very appropriate to the expressive appeal emotion I felt (a good healthy emotion said my analyst at that time, to dispose once and for all of that idiotic objection)—anyway, building up to the climax where there’s a long long long line, penultimate, too long for one breath, where I open out and give the answer (O starry spangled shock of Mercy the eternal war is here). All this rather like a jazz mass, I mean the conception of rhythm not derived from jazz directly but if you listen to jazz you get the idea (in fact specifically old trumpet solo on a JATP Can’t Get Started side)—well all this is built like a brick shithouse and anybody can’t hear the music is as I told you I guess I meekly informed Trilling, who is absolutely lost in poetry, is got a tin ear, and that’s so obviously true, I get sick and tired I read 50 reviews of Howl and not one of them written by anyone with enough technical interests to notice the fucking obvious construction of the poem, all the details besides (to say nothing of the various esoteric classical allusions built in like references to Cézanne’s theory of composition etc. etc.)—that I GIVE UP and anybody henceforth comes up to me with a silly look in his eye and begins bullshitting about morals and sociology and tradition and technique and JD [juvenile delinquency]. I mean I je ne sais plus parler—the horrible irony of all these jerks who can’t read trying to lecture me (us) on FORM.

Kerouac has his own specific method of construction of prose which he has pursued for a decade now and I have yet to see one piece of criticism taking that into account, or even interested enough to realize he has one and its implications and how it related to the rhythm of his prose,—much less how his method alters and develops chronologically from book to book, and what phases it goes thru, what changes one would encounter in so prolonged and devoted an experiment as his (rather like Gertrude Stein)—but nobody’s interested in literature, in technique, all they think about is their goddam lousy ideas of what they preconceive writing to be about and I’M SICK OF LISTENING TO THAT AND READING ABOUT THAT AND UNLESS THERE IS MORE COOPERATION FROM THE SUPPOSEDLY RESPONSIBLE PARTIES IN UNIVERSITIES AND MAGAZINES I ABSOLUTELY CUT OUT AND REFUSE TO SUBMIT MY HEART WRUNG PSALMS TO THE DIRTY HANDS AND MINDS OF THESE BASTARDS AND THEY CAN TAKE THEIR FUCKING literary tradition AND SHOVE IT UP THEIR ASS—I don’t need them and they don’t need me and I’m sick of putting myself out and being put down and hit on the head by jerks who have no interests but their ridiculous devilish social careers and MONEY MONEY MONEY which is the root of the EVIL here in America and I’m not MAD.

Footnote to Howl is too lovely and serious a joke to try to explain. The built in rhythmic exercise should be clear, it’s basically a repeat of the Moloch section. It’s dedicated to my mother who died in the madhouse and it says I loved her anyway and that even in worst conditions life is holy. The exaggeratedness of the statements are appropriate, and anybody who doesn’t understand the specific exaggerations will never understand Rejoice in the Lamb or Lorca’s Ode to Whitman or Mayakovsky’s At the Top of My Voice or Artaud’s Pour En Finir Avec Le Judgment de Dieu or Apollinaire’s “inspired bullshit” or Whitman’s madder passages or anything, anything, anything about the international modern spirit in poesy to say nothing about the international tradition in prosody which has grown up xarnor the tradition of open prophetic bardic poetry which 50 years has sung like an angel over the poor soul of the world while all sorts of snippy cats castrates pursue their good manners and sell out their own souls and the spirit of god who now DEMANDS sincerity and hell fire take him who denies the voice in his soul—except that it’s all a kindly joke and the universe disappears after you die so nobody gets hurt no matter how little they allow themselves to live and blow on this earth.

Anyone noticing the constructions and the series of poems in Howl would then notice that the next task I set myself to was adapting that kind of open long line to tender lyric feelings and short form, so next is Supermarket in California, where I pay homage to Whitman in realistic terms (eyeing the grocery boys) and it’s a little lyric, and since it’s almost prose it’s cast in form of prose paragraphs like St. Perse—and has nobody noticed that I was aware enough of that to make that shift there. Nor that I went on in the next poem Transcription of Organ Music to deliberately write a combo of prose and poetry some lines indented which are poetical and some lines not but paragraphed like prose to see what could be done with absolute transcription of spontaneous material, transcription of sensual data (organ) at a moment of near Ecstasy, not, nor has anybody noticed that I have technically developed my method of transcription (as Cézanne developed sketching) so that I could transcribe at such moments and try to bring back to the poor suffering world what rare moments exist, and that technical practice has led to a necessary spontaneous method of transcription which will pass in and out of poetry and so needs a flexible form—its own natural form unchanged—to preserve the moment alive and uncensored by the arbitrary ravenings of conceptual or preconception or post-censoring-out-of-embarrassment-so-called intelligence? Anyway there is a definite experiment in FORM FORM FORM and not a ridiculous idea of what form should be like. And it is an example that has all sorts of literary precedents in French poetry, in Hart Crane, in—but this whole camp of FORM is so ridiculous I am ashamed to have to use the word to justify what is THERE (and only use it in a limited academic context but would not dream of using this kindergarten terminology to poets from whom I learn—Kerouac, Burroughs or Corso—who start to new worlds of their own academic tribe that is so superciliously hung on COLLEGE that it has lost touch with living creation.)

The next problem attacked in the book is to build up a rhythmical drive in long lines without dependence on repetition of key words and phrases, who’s, Moloch’s, or Holy’s, a drive forward to a climax and conclusion—and to do it spontaneously (... well I’ve broken my typewriter on this explanation I continue on Peter’s—a 20 minute task) (Sunflower) with 15 years practice behind —to ride out on the breath rhythm without any artificial built in guides or poles or diving boards or repetition except the actual rhythm, and to do it so that both long long lines, and long lines, and shorter 10 words lines all have the same roughly weight, and balance each other out, and anybody take the trouble to read Sutra out will see it does that and the come of the rhythmic buildup is “You were never no locomotive Sunflower, you were a sunflower, and you locomotive (pun) you were a locomotive, etc.” And furthermore at this point in the book I am sick of preconceived literature and only interested in writing the actual process and technique, wherever it leads, and the various possible experiments in composition that are in my path—and if anybody still is confused in what literature is let it be hereby announced once for all in the 7 Kingdoms that that’s what it is—Poetry is what poets write, and not what other people think they should write.

The next poem America takes off on the free line and is an attempt to make combinations of short and long lines, very long lines and very short lines, something I’ve always wanted to do but previously had to depend on sustained rhythmical buildup to carry the structure of the poem forward. But in America I rely on discrete separate statements, rather than one long madbreath forward. Here as always however the measure, the meter, of each line, the think the thing that makes it a complete line, and the thing that balances each line with its neighbors is that each (with tactical exceptions) is ONE SPEECH BREATH —an absolute physical measure as absolute as the ridiculous limited little accent or piddling syllable count. And in this I’ve gone forward from Williams because I literally measure each line by the physical breath—each one breath statement, dictated by what has to be said, in relations and balance to the previous rhythmic statement.

The next task the book includes is the Greyhound poem which is attempt to apply the method with all tricks, long with short lines mixed, some repetition some not, some lyric, some Bardic, some surrealist or cubist phrasing, some pure imagistic-Williams notation—to apply all this to a realistic solid work proletarian common experience situation and come up with a classical type elegiac poem in modern rhythm and tricks etc. Also to make a nonhowling poem with separate parts etc.

So all this adds up to handbook of various experiments with the possibilities of an expressive long line, and perhaps carries on from where Whitman in U.S. left off with his long lines. At least I’ve in part III Howl attempted one visible organic stanza construction. Pound complains that Whitman was not interested enough in developing his line, I have tried to rescue long line for further use—tho at the moment (this last year I’ve abandoned it for a totally different mode than I’ve ever used, a totally wild page of free verse dictated by the immediate demands of spontaneous notation, with its appearance or form on the page determined by the structure of thought, rather than the aural quality primarily.

Latter’s unclear I’ll start over. Tho poetry in Williams has depended a lot on little breath groups for its typographical organization, and in Howl an extension into longer breaths (which are more natural to me than Williams short simple talks)—there is another possible approach to the measure of the line—which is, not the way you would say it, a thought, but the way you would think it—i.e. we think rapidly, in visual images as well as words, and if each successive thought were transcribed in its confusion (really its ramification) you get a slightly different prosody than if you were talking slowly.

This still not clear—if you talk fast and excitedly you get weird syntax and rhythms, just like you think, or nearer to what you think. Not that everybody’s thinking process is consciously the same—everybody’s got a different consciousness factory—but the attempt here is to let us see—to transcribe the thought all at once so that its ramifications appear on the page much as the ramifications of a sentence appear on the page when it’s analyzed into a paradigm in grammar books—example, from last poem (Laughing Gas—an attempt to transcribe that experience of the dis-appearance of chilicosm when consciousness is anesthetized, as an instance of what maybe happens at death)

 

The Bloomfield police car
With its idiot red light
Revolving on its head
Balefully at eternity
Gone in an instant
—simultaneous
appearance of bankrobbers
at the Twentieth Century Bank
The fire engines screaming
Toward an old lady’s
Burned-in-her-bedroom
Today apocalypse
Tomorrow
Mickey mouse cartoons

 

I’m disgusted! It’s unbelievable!
How could it all be so
Horrible and funny?
It’s a dirty joke!
The whole universe a shaggy dog story
With a weird ending that
Begins again
Till you get the point
“IT was a dark and gloomy night”
“in every direction in and out”
“You take the high road
and I’ll take the low”
everybody in the same
fantastic Scotland of the mind—
consciousness

Gary Snyder, Jack, thou Zens
Split open existence
And laugh and cry—
What’s shock? What’s measure?
When the mind’s irrational

 

- following the blinking lights
of contrariety—

 

etc. etc.

 

 

Well I haven’t done enough work yet in this direction, I want to get a wild page, as wild and as clear (really clear) as the mind—no forcing the thoughts into straightjacket—sort of a search for the rhythm of the thoughts and their natural occurrence and spacings and notational paradigms. Naturally when you read it aloud it also turns out to have intricate aural rhythm. But this is just an experiment—and naturally, this type writing gives thought an artificial form—the mere crystallizing it on page does—but to attempt to reproduce the droppings of the mind on the page—to work freely with this kind of direction—you see—you see—it’s fascinating to me.

Now if I have you at all intrigued with this as a possibility—to spread out into the field—there’s Olson’s interesting essay on projective verse, and Kerouac’s handmaiden article on approaches to prose—and all his experience in organizing whole novels with mad complicated structures (tres formal you see) built on the process of his mind in composition—novels say about Neal (unpublished Visions of Neal) which take off from the first shining memory, (irrespective of chronology) and take their form from the deep sublime symmetries that are to be found in following from naked recollection instance to another one to another I mean—I mean that in watching natural thought (like in meditation Buddhist type) you see the structure of your random seeming thought—and you can build whole prose or poetry structures on it. Not without effort at first, for it takes immense self discipline and effort to learn to not think (IBM) but to meditate and watch thought without interrupting it by literary self-consciousness and embarrassed preconceptions and rules.

So the most authoritative handbook of forms for me in modern poetry is Kerouac’s immense sonnet sequence Mexico City Blues, they’re not sonnets, they’re a series of 280 short (10-30 line) poems written sequentially in Mexico City, each has its own form-universe, all interrelated, being pieces of the same mind,—they look roughly like the piece of verse above I typed out—very weird and zigzag on the page—tremendous rich language and imagery too—nobody except the poetic hepcats in SF and Chicago Review picked up on this yet, nobody will publish it, a dirty rotten shame, but fuck everybody they don’t desire it it’s their Karma and they’ll never learn how to write. (This is for real and important).

Gary Snyder and Phil Whalen from SF we lived with, they’re learned Zens, Gary speaks Chinese and Jap and translates and taught anthropology and just got back from monastery etc. and specialized in comparative mythology, etc. etc. and peyote and T etc. he has a little beard, 27 years old rides a bicycle and has vow of poverty and likes girls—well him and Whalen (who just sits like a Buddha) also have vast unpublished manuscript. Well their work is great too tho who would know because who’s interested except those advanced enough in same line and similar experiences in composition? Jack myself Gary and Phil originally read together in SF and that was the renaissance and any evaluation of the poetry is incomplete without FULL authoritative account of their work and not one of these shits who presumes to write on the subject for MONEY or EGO reasons has taken the trouble to investigate, and I’ve tried some of their work out on Hudson and Partisan and all the so called responsible journals and been put down so I conclude the whole official publishing scene in the U.S. is a vicious camp and Rhav and etc. and Morgan at Hudson etc. etc. and all those people are ENEMIES of culture and civilization and a bunch of perverted fairy amateurs and will get theirs anyway when the universe collapses on them so why worry in any case.

Then we have the case of Gregory who has absolute genius at elliptical hilarity, great natural phrasing, and is as good a poet now as Dylan Thomas, his great Bomb poem and Army and Coit Tower in his book which is powerful and pure and rich like Fern Hill and why nobody gives him the respect and money he deserves I’ll never understand except a peculiar kind of ungrateful ill will of mediocrity which is always the enemy of the muse and will wind up poisoning Corso except that he’s too mad—yet I haven’t seen one responsible review of his book, an epoch making original book, tho much richer and better has already been composed by him—we are living in a very rich period of poetry in the U.S., it may be the very cracks in consciousness appearing over the fall of America is the concomitant of such a flowering—and his book’s been out years now, a year and half—without official notice people have picked up on it about 2,000 copies already—not one review. I can’t stand the pharisaical attitude of the whole treasonable intellectual group who think they are the civilization—basically the problem is they are not free, they have all sold their souls for money ego security conformity prestige university maturity social integration of the most spiteful and chicken kind—to have to endure the attacks and ignorance of these people is more than I should have to bear with the load I have to carry already it’s not fair and it’s asking too much of me, and to do that and have done that in a kind of ridiculous self imposed safety-poverty where I don’t have stamps to communicate with Corso half the time oh well I’m complaining like Hitler. But not one inch of understanding! And the vulgarity of the kind of opportunistic publicity so called friendly from the same intellectual types—in another guise or job—at Esquire or Time —stories which ball up the real prosodic and spiritual issues—halfwit interpretations of “negative values” of Howl—all the Highetss that are pain paid thousands of dollars a year to there and yatter out their opinions opinions opinions the screwy band of opinionated clunkheads that run everything from the Daily News to the Hudson Review- you should see the insulting letters I get from that Morgan lame duck poet. And Simpson reviewing Howl and an inept and prosodaically inaccurate parody and rejoicing (with Podhoretz) that Burroughs and Kerouac and other SF manuscripts are unavailable and unpublished—and you resolving your conflict by taking the angle that Howl is rather “vulgar”—I mean I sent it to you hoping you’d have the technical knowledge to deal with it as a piece of construction and that you’d fuck the whole sociological-tone-revolut whatever bullshit that everyone else comes on with—and to have Gold (Herb) mocking me for dragging myself around the magazines and publishers trying to go out of my way to introduce new materials, explain, spread some light—in the face of the worst civilized shits that ever ran so monstrous a conspiracy as America mass communication at all—to have to tackle all that single-handed practically and then be put down for all that—I DIDN’T HAVE TO TAKE THE TROUBLE—to have to listen to Rhav in Venice giggling that there’s no poetry in U.S. so that’s why they didn’t have a poetry editor at all 2 years ago—which was just his ignorance and the ignorance of all non-poets-yet he’s RUNNING this so called mental newssheet! ? and to call that responsible culture? And to have them and everybody else ignoring totally the productions of the Jonathan Williams’ Jargon series which for 8 years was the only respectable publishing company for experimental poetry—and total ignorance of all the work developed out of Black Mountain—the fucking sneers if anything—total incomprehension of Creeley’s funny volumes of verse, nobody reviewed or heard of Blackburn’s book (Dissolving Fabric—not GREAT but real), nor Levertov’s nor Zukofsky’s books there reviewed, Black Mountain Review the only decent mag operating for poets in America circulating 300 copies and nobody supposedly responsible at Columbia or anywhere taking the trouble to HELP, and the other BM poets minors, Oppenheimer, Perkoff, maybe Duncan etc.—and the great new young ones John Wieners and Edward Marshall—whom nobody ever heard of—or will investigate—and don’t think I haven’t written this to anybody I could get hold of, Gold, Rhav, Mademoiselle, Hudson, New World Writing, endless conversations and letters and explanations and trying to spread some good news, Life, and have them fuck it all up with their indifference or vulgar money journalism—and the whole problem of the Burroughs manuscript legally uncirculatable here in the U.S.—to say nothing of the great unknown Boston group around John Wieners (got a magazine Measure out in SF now)—and the beginning of interconnection of all these with the NY people, O’Hara Ashbery and Koch—at least these latter three pick up on something, and have some sympathy and openness, and respond to original attempts at composition.

The key and interest of Creeley’s verse incidentally is this. Whereas in short line Williams generally or mine, runs forward in the line like actual speaking, Creeley has an ear of his own that’s peculiar and laconic. He has got lately to using the most simplified forms, two lines together, free verse type couplets, trying to listen and balance them—his line tends to run backward, so to speak, rhythmically, the words very separate from each other and halting and stoic, effort of difficult nuts of speech, little pure sayings. A very peculiar subtle ear I’d say, NOT AT ALL like Williams, more like Pound writing Williams. Also a great historic literary grasp, used well and incisively as editor of the BMR—he’s a great figure—sort of the great connection between the BM-Olson-Williams school and the SF Williams-Beat-Zen types—and also the Bostonians, (Wieners and Marshall and others). That you say these people have poor or inadequate preparation, education, to write poetry—considering their individual respective learnings, languages, skills, etc. etc. educations (to say nothing of their radical approach)—I mean I don’t see how you come on like that, or why. They’re all perfectly literate. Snyder is more learned than you or anybody, except maybe Ansen. Creeley teaches Latin. Blackburn Provencal. Olson you know. Whalen’s reading everything both occidental and oriental. Kerouac knows everything intuitively. But also he’s read extensively in Buddhist specialties. I don’t see where you think you’re better educated particularly than, well I was going to say me, but that gets us into tendentiousness. I mean it isn’t really education that’s at issue, never was, I don’t know what illiterate jerk brought that point up, probably Podhoretz. But this kind of incredible corny crap has served for literary discussion at endless length. The scene is too corrupt.

Well what’s all this leading up to? I don’t know yet I’m just obviously blowing off steam. Yes, back to Xbalba. If you, one, is interested in a certain awkward natural style, for reasons, then the fact that Xbalba is “carefully made” is its most minor virtue—it’s technically no improvement on Williams, except it’s application of free verse to Wordsworthian meditation long poem—Tin-tern Abbey type, or Byronic meditation on ruins. But the real technical advance is in the long line poems, they proceed inevitably and naturally from the earlier poems, it’s just a sort of COMPOUND imagism—compounded cubist images, and compounded rhythmic long lines. By hindsight. If I ever worried about technique in advance I wouldn’t be able to write a line—THAT kind of worry. My worries are more practical having to do with the problem of breath and notation and the freeing of myself from preconceptions as to literary style. The beauty of writing is as Williams says, the invention, the discovery of new appropriate forms, the discovery of something you DON’T know, rather the synthesis repetition of things you do already know. It’s a jump up forward into life, unknown future life, not—not an old spinster hung up on her one virgin experience and endlessly crooning it to herself (while the robber unknown’s waiting under the bed). Any poem I write that I have written before, in which I don’t discover something new (psychically) and maybe formally, is a waste of time, it’s not living. I mean to get to the point of finally being frank and including queer material in the poems was a liberation, socially and psychically etc.—of expanding the area of reality I can deal with in the poems rather than shrinking back—(one reason I dig Gregory—he’ll write about anything, socks, army, food, Arnold, Loony—so he also now writes the One Great Poem about the Bomb. He’s extended the area of poetic experience further out than anyone I know—my own area is still rather limited to literary aesthetic hangovers from stupid education experiences. At least he writes, (as Koch coincidentally demanded in poem Fresh Air) a poem about PANTS. Williams precise real images are such a relief after affected iambics, but PANTS is such a relief after hard real Williams—a new Romanticism in bud. But expanding the area you can deal with directly, especially to include all the irrational of subjective mystic experience and queerness and pants—in other words individuality—means again (as it did for Whitman) the possibility in a totally brainwashed age where all communication is subject to mass control (including especially including offbeat type talks in universities and places like Partisan)—means again at last the possibility of Prophetic poetry—it’s no miracle—all you have to know is what you actually think and feel and every sentence will be a revelation—everybody else is so afraid to talk even if they have any feelings left. And this kind of Bardic frankness prophecy is what Whitman called for in American poets—them to take over from Priests—lest materialism and mass production of emotion drown America (which it has) and we become what he called the Fabled Damned among nations which we have—and it’s been the cowardice and treason and abandonment of the poetic natural democratic soul by the poets themselves that’s caused the downfall and doom of the rest of the world too—an awful responsibility. It’s not that Podhoretz and the rest of the whores are just a passing phenomenon of vulgarity like transient editorials in the daily news, it’s the very poison that’ll permanently sicken the mental soul here and has sickened the nation beyond recovery already—simply nobody taking responsibility for their own real thought—nothing but a lot of Trillinguesque evasions with communist doubletalk about moral imagination, a cheap trick to suppress their own inside irrational Life and Poetry and reduce everything to the intellectual standard of a Time magazine report on the present happiness and proper role of the American Egghead who’s getting paid now and has a nice job and fits in with the whole silly system—well it’s no loss to have it already blown out from under them by the ridiculous collapse of the American Century after Sputnik—I suppose there’s a new “examination of conscience” going on somewhere in their heads and they’ll come up with a new worried bald set of polemics while gay prophet Corso starves ignored in Paris. And I’m not overstating Corso’s magical importance. So anyway there is this Grove anthology of all these poets (about 30) coming out in a year and if you call that a BORE again I swear I’ll write you a letter goofier than this and twice as exasperated-unless you really believe that—in which case I give up but god knows I have tried—and while I’m on the subject, I’m sick of reading articles on Beat or SF poetry accusing me or anyone of inability to express myself, incoherence or jimmydeanesque oral blocking, inability to communicate etc.—I certainly refuse to get any more involved with the stupidity of other people in petty mad literary arguments and so for that reason have refrained (tho god knows I get messianic critical article impulses) from writing insane long articles refuting this and that misunderstanding, etc. etc. better save my energy for god knows what, at least something real, a letter, or a poem, agh, I wind up fuming in solitary. Well I know I’m raving, but I’ve saved it all up for you. And is Trilling behind all this mass stupidity about poetry, at least in NY?

Then there is McClure who started out as a narcissist but seems to have grown some, there was a gleam in him earlier, now it’s a fire. Long poems this last year very good. He has his own way.

All these people should have long ago been having books out in NY and reviewed seriously everywhere and the lack of their material has left the atmosphere poisoned by bad poetry and bad people and bad criticism—and the criticism! Incredible after 2 decades of new criticism and the complete incompetence to evaluate and recognize anything new—nothing but lame sociological bullshit in response to Jack’s prose or my poetry—or total amnesia with Gregory’s or Creeley’s and Olson’s etc. All the universities been fucking dead horses for decades and this is Culture!? Yet prosody and conceptions of poetry been changing for half a century already and what a Columbia instructor can recognize in Pound he can’t see in Olson’s method, what he can see in Lorca or Apollinaire he can’t see in Howl—it’s fantastic. You call this education? I call it absolute brainwashed bullshit. Not saying that either Olson or Howl are Lorca or Pound—I’m saying there’s a recognizable continuity of method—yet I have to listen to people giving me doublethink gobbledygook about why don’t I write poems with form, construction, something charming and carefully made. O Lawrence thou should be living at this hour! And Diana Trilling in public correspondence with that eminent representative of the younger generation Podhoretz about Lawrence! It’s a vast trap. And god save the poor young students who know nothing but that mad incestuous atmosphere.

I could go on all night. What else, what else? I don’t have your review here or I’d try and work in and out of that. And some jerk named Brustein who TEACHES at Columbia writing in a new money money money magazine Horizon attacking the Cult of Unthink, grandscale vicious attack on Stanislavsky Method, abstract painting (bedfellow!) and beat writing drooling on about how I express every degradation except the one humane one Loneliness—I mean some completely inaccurate irrelevant piece of journalism! Ignoring bi queer lonely lyrics about Whitman and Moloch in whom I sit lonely cocksucking—just goes on and says this here vicious incoherent Ginsberg refuses to admit he’s lonely. He TEACHES! Is such shit allowed on this earth? The whore of Babylon’s befallen us! Run for your life! And in highclass Partisan, Podhoretz (I keep coming back to him it seems he has collected all the garbage in one mind, archetype) quoting me about Jack’s “spontaneous bop prosody” proceeds to attack it instead of trying to figure what I mean—because I put it there as a tip, a helpful hint to criticism, a kindly extraverted gesture—and winds up all balled up confusing Jack’s diction and use of the mind’s hip talk to itself with the rhythm of the consequent sentences. This sort of ignorant Babel in Partisan Review—and they tell me he’ll be editor someday? Could that be true? Well they deserve it if they put up with that Yahoo type creepy mentality. I’m sick of the creeps bugging the scene, my scene, America’s scene, we only live once, why put up with that grubby type ambitious vanity? Ugh. It’s too ignoble. Take it away. I’ll take a sick junky any day to this horde of half educated deathly academicians. Not one yet, not ONE in all the colleges, magazines, book pages has said anything real, has got the point, either of spirit or prosody prosody (what a campy word—I’m sorry I keep using it—it really is that—but another way) NOT ONE. And this is the product of the schools of the richest nation of the earth, this is the intelligentsia that’s supposed to run the world, including moon? It’s a monster shambles.

Complaints, complaints, you hear them on a summers day. Pound is absolutely right... With usury. The whole problem is these types want money and security and not ART.

Well I don’t know where to go from here, I’ve unloaded it all on your head... tho you asked for it... on the other hand that’s what we’re here for, why not have a ball.

I did all this so I wouldn’t be involved in endless statements when we met, explanations, better shit it all out at once.

Tell me what’s happening. Write a note. See you later in the month. I’m snowed under with work and don’t go out much actually and hope to retreat and do nothing but stare at ceiling and write a little... have a manuscript to assemble inside a year... and Peter’s brothers worrys... looking maybe for an analyst, but they’re caught in the moneywheel too ... have to get a part-time job... and letters from fairies in Oshkosh wanting salvation... and the Woe of Laughing Gas.

Yours in the kingdom of music

Nella Gregsnig

Allen

 

The birds have eaten the berries.

Haven’t I sent this letter before in another life? And haven’t you received it?

Incidentally this letter is a sample of spontaneous bop prosody for prose—what happens when you let it all out and don’t censor too much—note mad rhythm of sentences—you blow.

[Ginsberg’s friend, the painter Robert LaVigne, wrote to him. LaVigne was worried about artist’s block, a lack of production. Allen did his best to calm his friend’s worries by giving personal examples and told him of his recent completion of the poem, Kaddish.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Robert LaVigne [n.p.] ca. January 15, 1959

 

Dear Bob:

 

Got your letter, started to read it and couldn’t because of the thin pencil, finally finished today, squinting. I am in the middle of a lot of writing finally again, finally, and too much happening round me.

One definite thing I felt—Gregory is back, we were talking about it the other day—these periods of productivity and lassitude are inevitable. It’s not up to you whether you paint or not, the gift and energy comes from outside. When you have something to do you will do it. I mean literally from outside. It has nothing to do with our conscious choice. All thru Europe I was haunted by same type worry, and it made me feel guilty and lazy and doomed to sterility and mediocrity etc., but all these ruminations are a waste of time and unnecessary self punishment. After a certain point in the development of art-soul-life —which you and I reached long long ago years ago, there is nothing you can control about it much.

Like, the more I shut people out and make peace in house to work, the more I worry about “work,” the less I do, I wind up sleeping in midafternoon.

The more I run around get drunk fuck up waste time and lose touch with my writing, the more I wind up putting down on paper. It’s amazing. It’s not under our control. Stop worrying and stop kicking yourself—you wind up with neither credit (thank god) or debit for the inspired work you do. It’s inspired and it’s not you.

Gregory agrees. He’s gone thru many periods of non-invention and decided he was finished and a week later he surpasses himself—or 3 months later as the case may be.

I spent 2 years since Howl- or is it 4 years by now?-worrying whether I’d be able to make higher than that—finally have (thank god) with huge poem about my mother [Kaddish]—but that was not the subject I planned on, or foresaw, would carry me up, nor was it written in a way I thought likely. Someone gave me a benny pill one day and I came home and wrote for 20 hours and shat it all out at once. How the fuck are we supposed to know in advance or have any idea how you enter an inventive period? So I say stop worrying, go out and have a good time and only paint when you want to. It’s not up to you, whether you make it or not. You’re destined to make it on some guiding angel’s terms. No? [...]

Love,

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Ginsberg continued to use his influence to have his friends’ work published. In this letter he offered to pay for the publication of books by Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen himself.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Lawrence Ferlinghetti [San Francisco, CA] January 23, 1959

 

Dear Larry:

 

Thanks for your encouraging telegram, it made me feel fine, for 2 days and Gregory’s upset you haven’t responded to his poems, help him too.

Enclosed find “Ignu.”

A book of these poems in May would be a good idea, if they are all finished by then, but let us plan on a book when I’m done with them, I’d rather not work by deadline, it doesn’t help composition, and I’m trying them out for defects at readings. But there’s no rush, actually, from commerce angle.

Grove said they’d print Snyder and Whalen but only if in a book with some poems of mine or Jack as third part, and neither Gary or I or Phil dug that, each for his own reasons. Don Allen wanted to print separate books, but [Barney] Rosset nixed it. So Allen gave them to Laughlin who said he dug the books but was too busy, too full up, and wanted to give Denise Levertov’s upcoming books special promotional attention, and not confuse his salesmen with too many poetry books at once. So they are left out again. I don’t think it’s good, all this, everybody getting books and books and nobody willing to print the two central Classicists. LeRoi Jones proposes to and that’s a good idea but he has hands full and no apparatus as yet. Won’t you please put their books out? They are good poets, they write and deserve audience after all this time, they are important in the U.S. poesy renaissance and their poems still get nowhere as far as publishing. I be willing to finance the costs for both of them if you are too overloaded with other manuscripts in preparations you can use my future royalties on the new 10,000 Howls for that—should cover Villiers costs for 2 books. I mean they are so historically important for SF muse and you are the historically important SF pioneer so it would work out madly great if you’d relent. Besides they’d sell enough to pay in long run and be well received prestigious items, etc. I remember originally you said you just weren’t that moved by their poetry, I’m writing this now in hope that acquaintance and recent readings of last 2 years in their visits have made them any more dear to you. Otherwise it means me running around spending more time, LeRoi overburdening his shop, etc. and sadness a little for them too. I mean, the romance, of us all having the same publisher and United Front. Well put this under your pillow dear Larry.

Leaving for Chicago next week to read several times to raise money for [Irving] Rosenthal’s independent magazine, he has almost enough now and the manuscripts are at the printers already. Mag to be called Big Table and that issue lovely, the Burroughs selection is very good. Also read this Monday night for the Living Theatre with Paul Goodman, another benefit to raise money for them, they’re putting on Williams (WC) Many Loves play. Then February 5 with Gregory big free attack on Columbia at MacMillan Hall there, maybe Jack join us. Then with LeRoi, Raymond Bremser and Ed Marshall to read to the shades at Howard U in Washington, DC. Gregory to Chicago and Washington, too. Then April 25 be in SF for a few weeks, read for Poetry Center and UC. I tried to get both to try arrange for Corso and O’Hara and said I’d share costs out of my loot but they are too bureaucratic and/or slow or unwilling to put themselves out so I’ll come alone, I guess. OK. Write about the Zenmasters’ poetry.

As ever,

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Scathing media attacks continued to plague Ginsberg and the Beats. Whenever Ginsberg became fed up with the biased reporting, he’d fire off a letter to the editor hoping, usually in vain, to reach a sympathetic ear.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Editors of Time [New York, NY] February 17, 1959

Sirs:

 

Your account of our incarnation in Chicago was cheap kicks for you who have sold your pens for money and have no fate left but idiot mockery of the muse that must work in poverty in an America already doomed by materialism.

You suppressed knowledge that the Chicago Review’s winter issue was censored by the University of Chicago; that the editors had resigned to publish the material under the name Big Table; that we offered our bodies and poetry to raise money to help publish the magazine; we left Chicago in the penury in which we had come.

You quoted what was charming in our speech out of context; you altered chronology of the evening of the party; your ignored the main event the reading at the Sherman Hotel, which was a religious intellectual exposition of poetry’s truth; you perverted the beauty of Orlovsky’s tears; you mocked the reports of your own employees on the scene who were moved by the reading; you spat on the appearance of the soul of poetry in America at a time when America needs that soul most; you brainwashed your millions of readers.

What you do to pervert the significance of larger public events which I do not witness I now can know: you are an instrument of the Devil and crucify America with your lies: you are the war-creating Whore of Babylon and would be damned were you not mercifully destined to be swallowed by oblivion with all created things.

 

Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso

 

 

[It wasn’t always in Ginsberg’s own defense that he wrote to editors. Often he wrote to defend his friends from harsh criticism.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Editor of the New York Times Book Review [New York, NY] May 11, 1959

To the editor of the NY Times Book Review:

 

I have read Kerouac’s Dr. Sax for seven years as a grand luminous poem. David Dempsey’s review of it in May 3rd’s Times seemed inconsiderate and mixed-up. Mr. Dempsey’s first paragraph may have confused readers: Dr. Sax was written after, not before, On the Road, which he referred to as having “established Jack Kerouac as a young man of considerable talent.”

The prose experiment begun in On the Road is carried out further here. Highspeed improvisatory composition—and when the mind bursts into flame the language is sublime. Here the method is applied to very gentle, comprehensible material: small town boyhood recollected in humane and mournful detail, side by side with development and resolution of a vast comic puberty fantasy.

Perhaps Mr. Dempsey read the book with almost no attention. He refers to Dr. Sax as “an elusive symbol of evil,” whereas on the contrary Dr. Sax is the good guy. In the daytime he is football coach, at night he puts on his prophetic Shadow costume and goofs around with magic trying to stop a giant snake from invading the world.

Most of the review is too generalized to examine in much detail. Mr. Dempsey’s consistent insults to this work of art (“bad taste ... incoherent ... mishmash of avant-gardism... depths to which a style can sink... mildly clinical... typing... perverse”) strike me as journalese stereotypes—mostly rather ill-mannered—to which the writings of many historically important literary originators have been subjected. This book is specifically a case in point.

I am writing this letter to warn readers that Dr. Sax is a work of Genius which will be lost to them if they accept Mr. Dempsey’s shallow reading. The structure in the book is modeled on the structure (i.e. the succession, order, speed, interruption, juxtaposition, rhythm, form) of thoughts flowing thru the normal mind, as far as they can be transcribed spontaneously with practiced concentration on the object.

This is related to, but is not the same as, Joyce’s attempt to synthesize a stream of consciousness thru slow revised invention. Kerouac relies for his materials on the actual “mindflow.” And it’s quite easy to read, delightful. He does not rely on the arbitrary, and for prose-creative purposes, ossified syntactical conventions that are taken for granted as standard writing by less imaginative and I might add less practiced stylists. The latter conventions are not (or were not in their time) standards of composition in most of the great 20th century works of prose (or poetic) invention, Proust, Céline, Faulkner, Pound, Williams, etc., have all made adjustments in this direction, according to their own interest.

The areas of origination and experiment have only begun to be explored. Primarily, among my contemporaries, it is Kerouac who has led the way. For him, with his courage and solitude, in the grand tradition of individualistic experimental composition, to be subjected to a continuous barrage of philistine hostility by petty critics, the “illustrious obscure” of Keats’ day, is a literary scandal which has poisoned the intellectual life of this country for three years.

The foul word “beatnik” is used several times to describe either Kerouac or his characters—even the innocent ghosts of Lowell. Must this journalistic sneer continue to be directed at artists? It is shameful. Then well may Kerouac continue to be Beat in America, a lone creator, like Melville, among generations of stereotypes. His Art’s a wonder. To be Beat this way is noble.

But the “beatnik” of mad critics is a piece of their own ignoble poetry. And if “beatniks” and not illuminated Beat poets, overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac, but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash Man and insult nobility where it occurs.

Prophetically,

 

Allen Ginsberg

 

 

[Ginsberg had sent a copy of Kaddish to his father, who complained to him about some of the explicit lines. In his reply to that letter, Allen also encouraged his father to try LSD, a drug Allen had recently discovered.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Louis Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ]

May 20, 1959

 

Dear Louis:

 

Got your letter & poems, which I return as per instructions. They are all fine. I’m OK, I will be here another few weeks, then start home slowly, overland. I went down to Stanford University the other day to be subjected to a research experiment with a new drug—LSD-25 (Lysergic Acid) which Huxley described in his books Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. It was astounding —I lay back, listening to music, and went into a sort of trance state (somewhat similar to the high state of laughing gas) and in a fantasy much like a Coleridge world of Kubla Khan saw a vision of that part of my consciousness which seemed to be permanent and transcendent and identical with the origin of the universe—a sort of identity common to everything—but a clear and coherent sight of it. Rather beautiful visual images also, of Hindu-type gods dancing on themselves. This drug seems to automatically produce a mystical experience. Science is getting very hip. It’s a very safe drug—you ought to contact someone at Rutgers who’s doing experiments with it and try it—like a comic movie.

The line about the “beard around the vagina” is probably a sort of very common experience and image that children have who see their parents naked and it is an archetypal experience and nothing to be ashamed of—it looks from the outside, objectively, probably much less shocking than it appears to you I think—it’s a universal experience which almost everyone has had though not many poets have referred to it but it can do no harm to be brought to consciousness.

Caw Caw I still rather like since it’s the climax of a sort of musical form, a fugue—two themes Caw Caw and Lord Lord—representing realistic bleakness-pain-materialism, versus Lord Lord which is mystical aspiration that alternate and in the last line merge into one cry. I’ve read it aloud here and it sounds alright.

I’ll be here till around June 1 (I’m going back to Stanford then for another bout with the Lysergic Acid) and then see if I can find someone with a car driving east—would like to see the Southwest and Grand Canyon on the way home.

The jet plane ride here (5 hours) was like a movie of topographical geography.

This Saturday all the poets get together to give a reading to raise money to resuscitate Measure magazine and so that’ll be on its feet again at least for another issue.

Partisan asked me to reply to Diana T’s³⁶ article but I am busy with other worlds so I’ll shut up and let things take their own course. Hope you are O.K. and having nice springtime.

Love,

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Even though Ginsberg’s letters did not always elicit positive responses, he continued to write them.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Richard Eberhart [Washington, DC] October 20, 1959

 

Dear Dick:

 

Thanks for live letter. I never had a public stance of any kind, I haven’t got that kind of mind, please don’t get me further confused with the image of a beatnik disseminated via mass media, I am not responsible for other people’s bad poetry (Philistine journalism) and have done my best to confute it, i.e. for the most part shut up and not replied except to continue reading and writing poetry. I was actually sort of offended by Diana Trilling’s essay despite the evil joy I felt at being taken so seriously at such length because she misunderstood and perverted everything, missed the point really—but there’s too much to explain. I mean I have stomach trouble now, too much evil opinion around, I get it all on my head—I’m not a social protest poet I’m a reader of Blake and an angel’s poet. Guggenheim [grant] is not castles, I can have castles already if I want, I don’t want castles, I want to go to India and need fare there for me and Peter Orlovsky and a few other people. I have no vow of poverty, I have a vow of penury—i.e. live cheap and buy clothes at salvation army and not get things complicated with too many possessions, this is strictly a personal convenience and not a public stance. Have been broke mostly the last 4 years and will continue to be broke in India despite Guggenheim in any case. One thing I have now, is a semi permanent small income from City Lights, about $800 a year, which is convenient and I have got by on, without other work—so I do nothing now but read and write and goof around and think, which is fine by me.

What gave me the stomach trouble I think was a series of readings at various colleges trying to get over the heads of academy to the student and read works of various new poets—Olson, Creeley, myself, Corso, Kerouac, Snyder, Whalen, Wieners, etc. I think Diana Trilling didn’t realize what had really been going on and had accepted a Time magazine version, which I suppose is no fault of hers except her imagination and trust faults her.

I’m outnumbered by journalism—that is I’ve continued to talk to people as individuals rather than taking crafty public stances and so that’s led to my being open to all sorts of ridicule. Rather continue to do that and play by ear than be shut up, silent and moody, or suspicious continually, like Greta Garbo. Whatever is genuine will come thru in the long run and surprisingly I think has despite all the vulgarization and academic malice.

I’ve mainly not been at war with the society, the society if anything has been at war with me. All I’ve done which seems on outside like war or social protest is maintain my sympathies where my sympathies were, i.e. with the god-seekers, and experimental poets.

I’ll send Big Table and Yugen under another cover. Yugen is I think the best avant-garde poetry magazine in the country—surprised the Library [of Congress] doesn’t have it. Is there any possibility of the poetry room now beginning to amass and distribute info on the variety of really important new work coming out of little presses in the last 2 years? There is too much for me to explain in a letter, right now. I’ll send you Yugen and Big Table.

By the way the Library has a tape I made with Corso and Orlovsky, I wish you would listen to it—we made it last year. All new poems, and we were pretty high and gay when we read.

I have a new book about ready for City Lights—should be about 3 times as thick as Howl.

I’ll write again soon

Allen

Your letter was really so nice to get—I thought you might also be annoyed with me thru mis-understandings etc. Rexroth having been away 2 years thinks I’m living with millionairesses and hanging around in Hollywood. Main change is that I’ve gotten a little sadder, and perhaps paranoiac.

I had some Lysergic Acid (LSD-25) in Stanford this year and had a very beautiful experience of total transcending precipitated by it, have you heard of or tried this? I had had some earlier without drugs and have something to check on, as experience—this drug is amazing.

 

 

[In 1960 Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti were invited to a writer’s conference in Chile. Allen took advantage of his open-ended roundtrip ticket and stayed in South America for another six months.]

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Santiago, Chile] to Peter Orlovsky [New York, NY] January 24, 1960

 

Dear Peter:

 

Came down here to Concepción, sat part way in front pilot’s seat in control cabin and saw the Andes far away on left. The Conference lasted a week and ended yesterday. I seem to be the only bearded man in Chile, so my photo was in all the newspapers—and children on the streets thought I was Fidel Castro’s representative. Most everybody at Conference was un-poetic but one thing was most interesting, all the communists seemed to take over enough to make the whole week a big argument between pro and anti political writers. Everybody from every country got up and made fiery speeches about the workers. Everybody wanted revolutions. I delivered an address also on Wednesday—in broken Spanish, English, and French—and had translated and read them Wiener’s queer poems, Lamantia’s “Narcotica” and Gregory’s “Bomb”—plus a long lecture on prosody, jazz, drugs, soul, etc. It was a big mad interesting speech and they dug it—I think it was probably the best of the speeches. Then 2 nites ago Ferlinghetti and I read—he did very well but my reading was without real feeling but had some force. So I was depressed afterward tho the audience seemed to enjoy it. But was unhappy not to deliver the lamb to the communists. But anyway withal we were big hit and now Beat Generation is considered great new American poetry and all the professors will bring it back to Uruguay and Argentina and perhaps Colombia.

At same time there are some interesting people here like in Tangier—the best friend I’ve had here is a strange roly-poly philosophy professor at the university who talks English and is called Luis Oyarzún. “Luce” (lu-cha” ) (little light) is a big telepathic botanist, naturalist, fairy, astronomer and poet (tho not a great poet—too shy)—he’s like a small Ansen but funny. He has various queer friends including an old man named Hyde who has a house here and is very brilliant and lost like an old lady with books. Also a young couple of lovers, boys, whom they all know—so there’s a whole semi-hip queer secret society here. Oyarzún is also a big head of the Fine Arts School and is leaving for China in a week. He says he will get us invited (expenses paid by Chinese) to visit China—everybody here visits China. He sends you regards.

I’ve slept with nobody and masturbated twice. The land is like California. Tomorrow I’m taking a 3rd class train south towards an island called Chiloé near the broken islandy bottom of the continent. I’ll stay there a week and eat fish and maybe finish Kaddish. Then return here, fly to Santiago, take a round trip bus ride across Andes, return and fly to La Paz Bolivia—see Machu Picchu —then to Lima Peru for a week. Then to Panama City for a week. So I will be here about another month or month and a half and then be back.

How are you and Lafcadio? From here it seems you must be in a labyrinth of his worries. Tho I have been in a labyrinth of communists which is just as bad. [...]

My writing here is simplified down because I am so used to talking simple Spanish I feel as if I were translating everything to basic explanations. I have been a little lonely but feel good anyway. The unfinished book bothers me so I may try it here more. I hope you are not feeling trapped in N.Y C. Perhaps we can all go to Mexico later in the Spring or further on. Is Lafcadio showing any signs of independence and feeling?

My plane ticket is good for side trips to Bolivia so it’s very cheap for traveling.

Another person I like is Nicanor Parra, a poet about 45 years old who is always falling in love with Swedish girls, writes intelligent and sincere poetry and is also a big mathematics professor who studied in England and U.S.A. He too went to China last year and believes and accepts Mao Tse-tung’s Yenan literature theory. City Lites just put out a book of his translations—not bad, at least readable. I’m sorry you did not, could not, come—you’d have been the most amazing person here.

Well OK for now—I haven’t written anyone but you and I should send postcards to everybody so I will today. I am generally confused, by the communists and by being alone, but it feels good to be wandering solitary in South America. No cocaine yet but still have to get the Chilean yage-like drugs and try them.

Love,

 

Allen.

 

 

 

[Ginsberg extended his trip to South America month by month. He was determined to find a source for ayahuasca, the drug Burroughs had discovered in 1953 on his own South American travels.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Huanuco, Peru] to Eugene Brooks [New York, NY] June 2, 1960

 

Dear Eugene:

 

Happy birthday, so today I am rapidly approaching your age and you’re moving on too. I’m stuck for the day in a little town on the eastern slope of the Andes called Huanuco, waiting for a bus or truck to take me further down to the jungle and a town called Pucallpa on the Ucayali river, where I’ll settle for a week or so. The roads are so crude that traffic moves only in one direction on alternate days, and I came here yesterday so have to wait a day for the next connection. I left Lima, where I stayed 3 weeks, a few days ago, crossing Andes by railroad and bus. This town is I guess typical of all I’ve seen in Peru and Bolivia —I have a hotel room that cost me 40¢, there are Chinese restaurants here (many Chinese in Peru) where I can eat huge meals (a plate of steamed trout with soy sauce, fried wonton, and diced chicken w/vegetables plus pot of tea) for 70¢. The town has one square with City Halls and bureaucracy buildings, a lot of streets of adobe houses for 10,000 people, and a big open air market where they sell everything from magic talisman bone deaths heads to weird tropical fruits. Also local Indian blankets. I tried to buy one for $2.00—huge white wool blanket with colored designs in it—but on inquiring found that the Peruvian postal system is so rudimentary I can’t mail it outside the country. So can’t carry it into tropics in knapsack, or, too much trouble to do so. I’ve been getting money all along from City Lights and various other small checks from magazines so still have $140 which is quite a lot here, in travelers checks. So far have been in Southern Chile—all the area now destroyed by earthquake from Concepción down to Isle of Chiloé—and Bolivia and all over Peru—mainly Cuzco and Machu Picchu where the Inca ruins are. All along the coast of Peru it’s desert, filled with pre-Incan ruins and graveyards. One of the big illegal local industries is robbing graves for the funeral pottery buried with the dead —some 2,000 years old, others newer. I have a few pots I’ve bought for a buck each and will try to get government permission to bring them back. Good pottery is worth up to $2,000 in the states and cost $100 here or less if you buy directly from the grave robber. I have some painted bowls worth maybe $50.00 each, and some clay figurines—paid $2.00 for the lot. One could make good money smuggling them out. I get to take a few out legally since I’m an official literary guest of a government cultural institution—gave a reading here, and am having a small book of translations published in Lima soon. But I’ve been all hung up on archaeology and pre-Incaic pots.

Anyway, 2 or 3 days more travel overland brings me to Pucallpa,—there I go visit a local curandero or witch doctor who is a specialist in preparing a native brew called ayahuasca—which is similar to peyote, mescaline and LSD-25. Only stronger, I have heard. It’s part of an ancient jungle tradition, and the curanderos use it to invoke visions or cure physical ailments. I’m going to study witch-doctoring for a few weeks at the source. Then I don’t know—I can take a 5 day raft or launch trip down the Ucayali river to Iquitos which is the big Peruvian port on the western end of the Amazon River. From there I can get a boat 2,500 miles all the way down to the Atlantic on the Amazon for $50.00. However I think I’ll save that trip for the next time I get down here if ever. Takes several weeks and my money’s a little low—I’d have to fly back to Peru to get my free plane home. Anyway I’ll see a little jungle and few days of riverboat travel. —I’ve been writing a lot, especially lately, which is why I write so few letters. Every time I sit down there’s a new town to describe in diary. [ ... ]

Economic conditions here are real dirty, in Lima there’s a mile square mountain of garbage (the only of its kind in the world I think) where Indians live and work,—whole communities and streets in the garbage, scavenging wood and broken glass and pig food for a living. The average Peruvian income is $120 a year, caused mostly by stupid laws like the above preventing me from mailing a Peruvian-made blanket abroad. That’s $ American $2 I don’t leave in this town. I’ve been well except for some piles, very slight. Got a long black beard still. Love to you as always, and love to the children and Connie. As ever. Yr. weird brother.

 

Allen

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Pucallpa, Peru] to William S. Burroughs [Tangier, Morocco] June 10, 1960

 

Dear Bill,

 

I’m still in Pucallpa, ran into a little plump fellow, Ramon P—who’d been friend to Robert Frank (photographer of our movie) in ’46 or so here. Ramon took me to his curandero, in whom he has a lot of faith and about whose supernatural curing powers he talks a lot, too much, about. The Maestro, as he’s called, being a very mild and simple seeming cat of 38 or so, who prepared a drink for 3 of us the other night; and then last night I attended a regular Curandero all night drinking session with about 30 other men and women in a hut in jungly outskirts of Pucallpa behind the gaswork field.

The first time, much stronger than the drink I had in Lima, ayahuasca can be bottled and transported and stay strong, as long as it does not ferment, needs well-closed bottle. Drank a cup, slightly old stuff, several days old and slightly fermented also, lay back and after an hour (in bamboo hut outside his shack, where he cooks), began seeing or feeling what I thought was the Great Being, or some sense of it, approaching my mind like a big wet vagina, lay back in that for a while. Only image I can come up with is of a big black hole of God-Nose thru which I peered into a mystery, and the black hole surrounded by all creation, particularly colored snakes, all real.

I felt somewhat like what this image represents, the sense of it so real.

The eye is imaginary image, to give life to the picture. Also a great feeling of pleasantness in my body, no nausea. Lasted in different phases about 2 hours, the effects wore off after 3, the fantasy itself lasted from ¾ of hour after I drank to 2½ hours later more or less.

Went back and talked to The Maestro, gave him 35 soles ($1.50) for services and talked with him about peyote and LSD, he’d heard of peyote. He’s a mestizo who studied in San Martin (upper Huallaga territory). He gave me samples of his mix, uses young cultivated ayahuasca plant in his back yard, and mixes that about half and half with a catalyst known as the ‘Mescla’ which is another leaf known in Chama Indian language as Cahua (pronounced Coura) and locally by him in Pucallpa is called Chacruna. Said he’d get me more samples to bring back to Lima Natural History Museum to identify. Cooks the mixes together all day and strains the broth, gives the drained leaves a second cook too. Anyway the preparation is not excessively secret. I think Schultes [Peruvian botanist] saw and knows the preparation. Can add other leaves of other plants, too, I don’t know these combinations to try out. He seems generally interested in drugs, serious, and not mercenary at all, good type, has quite a following here, does physical cures, his specialty.

Anyway to make long story short, went back to formal group session in huts last night, this time the brew was prepared fresh and presented with full ceremony, he crooning (and blowing cigarette or pipe smoke) tenderly over the cup-mouth for several minutes before (enamel cup, I remember your plastic cup) then I light cigarette, blow a puff of smoke over cup, and drain. Saw a shooting star, Aerolith, before going in, and full moon, and he served me up first, then lay down expecting God knows what other pleasant vision and then I began to get high, and then the whole fucking Cosmos broke loose around me, I think the strongest and worst I’ve ever had it nearly. (I still reserve the Harlem experiences, being natural, in abeyance. The LSD was perfection but didn’t get me so deep in nor so horribly in). First I began to realize my worry about the mosquitoes or vomiting was silly as there was the great stake of life and death. I felt faced by death, my skull in my beard on pallet on porch rolling back and forth and settling finally as if in reproduction of the last physical move I make before settling into real death, got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a snake seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body. I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe, or a Jivaro in head-dress with fangs vomiting up in realization of the murder of the universe, my death to come, everyone’s death to come, all unready, I unready, all around me in the trees the noise of these spectral animals the other drinkers vomiting (normal part of the cure sessions) in the night in their awful solitude in the universe, vomiting up their will to live, be preserved in this body, almost. Went back and lay down. Ramon came over quite tender and nurse-like (he hadn’t drunk, he’s sort of an aide to help the sufferers) asked me if I was OK and ‘Bien Mareado’ (Good and drunk?). I said ‘Bastante’ and went back to listen to the specter that was approaching my mind. The whole hut seemed rayed with spectral presences all suffering transfiguration with contact with a single mysterious thing that was our fate and was sooner or later going to kill us, the Curandero crooning, keeping up a very tender, repeated and then changing simple tune, comfort sort of, God knows what signified, seemed to signify some point of reference I was unable to contact yet. I was frightened and simply lay there with wave after wave of death-fear, fright, rolling over me till I could hardly stand it, didn’t want to take refuge in rejecting it as illusion, for it was too real and too familiar, especially as if in rehearsal of last minute death my head rolling back and forth on the blanket and finally settling in last position of stillness and hopeless resignation to God knows what fate, for my being, felt completely lost strayed soul, outside of contact with some thing that seemed present. Finally had a sense that I might face the question there and then, and choose to die and understand, and leave my body to be found in the morning. I guess grieving everybody, couldn’t bear to leave Peter and my father so alone. Afraid to die yet then and so never took the chance, (if there was a chance, perhaps somehow there was), also as if everybody in session in central radiotelepathic contact with the same problem, the great being within ourselves. Coming back from vomit saw a man knees to chest I thought I saw an X ray his skull I realized he was crouched there as in shroud (with towel mosquito protection wrapped round his face) suffering the same trial and separation. Thought of people, saw their images clearly, you, mysterious apparently know more than I do now and why don’t you communicate, or can’t you, or have I ignored it? Simon seemingly an angel in his annihilation of vanity and giving forth new life in children. If any interplanetary news comes through he said ‘I’ll be the first to be relaying it over the wires in a way that won’t get it fucked up’. Francine his wife, sort of a seraph of woman, all women (as all men) the same, spectral creatures put here mysteriously to live, be the living gods, and suffer crucifixion of death like Christ, but either get lost and die in soul or get in contact and give new birth to continue the process of being (tho’ they themselves die, or do they?) and I lost and poor Peter who depends on me for some heaven I haven’t got, lost, and I keep rejecting women, who come to minister to me, decided to have children somehow, a revolution in the hallucination, but the suffering was about as much as I could bear and the thought of more suffering even deeper to come made me despair, felt, still feel, like lost soul, surrounded by ministering angels (Ramon, the Maestro, yourself, the whole common world of diers), and my poor mother died in God knows what state of suffering. I can’t stand it, vomited again (Ramon had come over and told me to vomit off the porch where I was lying, if I had to later, very careful kind situation). I mean, is this a good group. I remember your saying watch out whose vision you get, but God knows I don’t know who to turn to finally when the chips are down spiritually and I have to depend on my own serpent-self’s memory of merry visions of Blake, or depend on nothing and enter anew, but enter what? Death? and at that moment, vomiting still feeling like a great lost serpent seraph vomiting in consciousness of the transfiguration to come, with the radio telepathy sense of a being whose presence I had not yet fully sensed, too horrible for me, still, to accept the fact of total communication with say everyone an eternal seraph male and female at once, and me a lost soul seeking help. Well slowly the intensity began to fade, I being incapable of moving in that direction spiritually, not knowing who to look to or what to look for. Not quite trusting to ask the Maestro, tho’ in the vision of the scene it was he who was the local logical ministering spirit to trust, if anyone. Went over and sat by him (as Ramon gently suggested) to be ‘blown’, that is he croons a song to you to cure your soul and blows smoke at you, rather a comforting presence, tho’ by now the steep fear had passed. That being over got up and took my piece of cloth I brought against mosquitoes and went home in moonlight with plump Ramon, who said the more you saturated yourself with ayahuasca the deeper you go, visit the moon, see the dead, see God, see tree spirits, etc.

I hardly have the nerve to go back, afraid of some real madness, a changed universe permanently changed, tho’ I guess change it must for me someday, much less as planned before, go up the river six hours to drink with an Indian tribe. I suppose I will. Meanwhile will wait here another week in Pucallpa and drink a few more times with same group. I wish I knew who, if anyone, there is to work with that knows, if anyone knows, who I am or what I am. I wish I could hear from you. I think I’ll be here long enough for a letter to reach me, write.

 

Allen Ginsberg

 

Allen Ginsberg [Iquitos, Peru] to Louis Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] June 21, 1960

 

Dear Louis:

 

Wrote two weeks ago or so—by now I’ve crossed over Andes and spent 10 days in Pucallpa, a small town on a huge river big as the Hudson—The Ucayali —which winds 1000 miles up to the Amazon—so took a small steamboat 6 days ago and, sleeping in hammock with mosquito net on passageway on deck, spent the week traveling up to the Amazon thru huge flat area of jungle—on riverside small grey thatchroof huts and every 20 or 50 miles a small cluster of houses and every 100 miles a little town, frontier towns, of several thousand gents. Cost of boat trip including 3 meals a day is $6.00 which is cheap—am now on last day of trip and just a few hours ago entered the Amazon proper—big wide flat brown shining water wide as a big lake with sticks and greenery floating on surface, balsa rafts and canoes paddling near shore—we dock at Iquitos this evening and I go find hotel, stay a week, and then fly back to Lima, to catch plane home a week later. Iquitos is the river port at western-Peruvian end of the Amazon. From Iquitos one can take another steamer down thru Brazil and the Atlantic, 2500 miles, for $50—but I haven’t the money or the time, and have to get back to Lima.

While in Pucallpa my main purpose was to look up a local Curandero or witch doctor and try a native herbal brew named ayahuasca which reportedly gives visions—similar to peyote, Mescaline and Lysergic Acid. Well I tried it 4 times and with remarkable results as far as I was concerned subjectively. I certain saw “visions.”

What the drug seems to do is activate the unconscious without putting the regular consciousness asleep—so that you can both be awake and dream real solid dreams at the same time—a neat trick, but quite possible. The local Indians use it for curing illnesses, finding lost objects, communicating with the dead, religious visions, etc. and I’m sure they can do all that, from what I’ve seen. It was like stepping into a voodoo movie and finding it was all real.

Anyway the main dream or vision I had, was of the condition of my own death, i.e., how it feels like to die—and I don’t think I’ve ever (except once before having “visions” in Harlem) been so terrified before in my life while awake. It seemed that death was a thing, not mere emptiness, a living being—and my whole life was being judged and found a vanity, as in Ecclesiastes, and I saw as in x-ray my skeleton-head settling in final position on pillow to give up the Ghost. A familiar feeling, strangely, with the realization that I had known all along, but avoided consciousness, of the fact that I am flesh and that flesh is crass. The main after effect, aside from a desire to widen further the area of my consciousness, and realization that my life so far has been relatively empty, was resolution to bear children sooner or later before it is too late. The question is to be or not to be—and also, what Thing is beyond Being. I saw something—a sort of great consciousness which was familiar, but unhuman—as if in one being were united an Elephant and Snake and Mosquito and Man—and all the trees—nothing like the terrible hidden Lord of Moses or Revelations, it felt like. Whether this is vision or hallucination makes very little difference. I passed thru several hours of intense suffering awareness of the worm at my ear. I thought of you and the whole family—everyone I knew passed thru mind at one time or another—with tears and love—realization that sooner or later, I, or everyone, enters a great solitude and give up everything—which was painful to realize, which is why I said my life seemed a vanity, for I as yet had thought of it as semi-permanent and had not considered the inevitable. It also seemed that until I were able to freely give myself up, entrance into some great joy (in life or beyond life) would not be seen—but that there is some kind of inhuman harmony yet to come. But this is speculation. In any case the universe did seem like one Being.

Well that’s enough of that for awhile. I wrote a great deal this month, huge ranting wild poems, psalms, notes, sketches, drawings, a whole book actually. I’ll have to reread it in a year and see if it’s still hot. But poetry doesn’t seem enough—“in the vast strange and middle of the night.”

Also bought a lot of native pottery—hand-painted ceramic ashtray types—for souvenirs, which I’ll bring home—and a hammock and mosquito net.

I thought of poor Williams, living so long on the edge of death—“for this is the first—and last—day of the world”—he wrote. Had a dream of him entering Non-Being with huge snowy-feathered angel wings. And saw you Louis as a sort of elephant-nosed seraph or deity with old human eyes. Well the Indians in the jungle certainly don’t lack a huge metaphysical inner civilization, half the town of Pucallpa drinks ayahuasca every week and has its own secret life aside from radios and movies of the A-Bomb. So that’s I suppose the proper poetic climax of my trip down here—it’s been almost half a year and I am nostalgic to get back to N.Y.C. and see everybody and see you.

Love,

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Ginsberg had met Timothy Leary, a young psychology professor who taught at Harvard. In 1960 Leary invited Allen and Peter to visit him in Cambridge to take some of the hallucinogens he had been experimenting with. In this letter to Corso, Ginsberg described the effects. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Gregory Corso [Paris, France] December 8, 1960

 

Dear Gregory:

 

I am in doldrums and don’t know what I want to do—how to go to Sweden with Peter—and what to do with Lafcadio? And Peter has girlfriend who really likes him who would be sad if we left right now with fates unsettled—and this week Konstantin Simonov and Russian writers visited us, we took them walk on Brooklyn Bridge and showed them your educational alliance street—and they said come to Moscow and live with us free. We could go there from Sweden—I haven’t heard from the Swedish Museum—but I guess I would go as soon as I read proofs of my book—or before. Last week Peter, Laf and I went up to Harvard—two weeks ago. We gave great reading for psychoanalysts, 100 of them. They invited us to try cylocybin (mushroom drug) so we did, second time I got on (it’s like mescaline) in bed with Peter naked, I was afraid to come, lest I spurt out imaginary beings into the void, I realized I was a God, I am the God I always longed for, I could make same babes in this dimension, or imaginary ones in others, wouldn’t let Peter blow me (till I came down)—was naked, saw star of Bethlehem like Giotto miniature outside New England window, realized all consciousness was waiting for me the Messiah to make a break, all were waiting for one to say I am One, and announced to all the new Birth of Millennial Union One Mass Of Endless Consciousness, to paragraphed spaceship to leave the earth for the sun and explore this dimension this universe, instead of vomiting and seeking in invisible mental universes for fear of being one and only Gods in one and only this, I rose in all my Hebraic nakedness followed by Peter in Russian nakedness and strode downstairs King without robes into the midst of a party of psychologists, commandeered the telephone and began to carry out my mad scheme for announcing the new birth by telling the operator—yes, who is this?—G-O-D and get me Kerouac in Long Island—and after him I was going to interlink by electrical telephone communication with Bill and you and Khrushchev and Mao and Lucien and Mailer in Bellevue behind thick bars—all on phone system, is really set up for the interlinking of consciousness when the time comes—finally got Jack on the line from Boston—shouted to him, “Come up to Boston—I saw Milton’s Lucifer in vast dark space! Take a plane and come up here immediately—the revolution is beginning—gather all the dark angels of light at once—it is time to seize power over in the universe and become the next consciousness—” And he laughed and says, “Whazammater, are you high ?” “I am high and naked and I am the king of the universe. Get on a plane it is time!”—“But I got my mother...” “Bring your mother” I command—serious—I really have the answer—“Ah I’m tired”—But he was interested and strange—“What do you want to do?” I ask and he says, lay down and die, so I shout, “What’s the matter with you, are you AFRAID?” And that’s it, he really is afraid of God, he don’t know that he already is God, everybody like me looking for power outside them, afraid to be the authority of the universe—who else but us if IT the life force—is God?—and was he surprised hearing that in my voice—first time in ten years—yes, you are, were, right, it is man (published in Nomad I think?) ME is IT—I was rapturous on the phone I made him promise not to die—I thought I would save everybody. Take over the universe and freeze it in permanent eternity present, Williams not die, I almost called him too—convoke all the consciousness at once over radio, telephonetelevision electronic thinking machine hooked into myriad eyes and ears and TURN ON THE UNIVERSE—Great horns of Die valkerie were on the phonograph inspiring me—da dam, da dam da da dee! Revolt in paradise, the messiah has broken loose—Finally the psychologists prevailed on me to lie down naked on couch with Peter and stop piling up their private phone bill and we listened to Joyce’s voice Finneganing through time. I realized sooner or later that drugged consciousness would wear off. I didn’t have strength right then to break through the massed negative consciousness of the whole world, the time would come, all is well, I got the great inspiration, I’m through magic psalming outside myself to find the great power of being. I am the great magician henceforth. I’m reading Milton and will go back to Blake’s Milton too.

That was Lafcadio’s first plane ride too by the way. Peter when high saw all the dinosaur battles of yore and foretime. Then we rushed out to Gloucester and dragged Olson back to Boston and turned him on a mighty dose of mushroom. He lit up and turned into Santa Claus, kept calling the psychologist coach—psychologist a nice coach-type guy who digs getting high, wants to start a pyramid club and turn America on, free the drug on the market, we’re starting a conspiracy, next week we turn on Rosset, [Robert] Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, David Reisman, etc. etc. (we’ll think up) believing his eyes and ears and repeating—“DID YOU SAY THAT?” Incredulously happy. First time he ever got high and he immediately understood me for the first time ever.

Love

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Ginsberg had always been interested in the effect drugs had on the human mind, but from this period on he took a leading role in efforts to have mind-expanding drugs decriminalized. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Kennett Love³⁷ [New York, NY] February 2, 1961

 

Dear Kenny:

 

Thanks for your letter, I haven’t had time to answer, which I wanted to, till tonight. There is one important thing in your letter which I wanted to communicate information about: “she [Emily Harrison] says Anslinger³⁸ is a nasty type but she says Anslinger only administers the law and that the law and the narcotics bureau is the root of the problem.” See, this point is basically Anslinger’s con—it is Anslinger and his Bureau, not the law, which is the big block. I don’t know where to begin to illustrate this and make immediate sense but will try to outline the facts sketchily.

First the original law is just a tax stamp to control narcotics use, that’s why it is under Treasury Department (Anslinger and all). Anslinger got in as head administrator and by administrative practice added more and more drugs to the ones originally named in the Harrison Act—by his decrees and practices the control of addicts was taken from medical hands and put in police hands.

The actual law now on federal books allows doctors to take on addicts as patients and give them steady narcotics if they deem medically wise.

But Anslinger has conducted a continuous 20 year campaign to extend police control by harassing and tripping and tricking doctors, he takes every doctor that openly opposes him and treats addicts and by every means legal and illegal gets them out of business. The AMA has as usual shut up and not defended the doctors, so that hardly any doctor anywhere will treat an addict as a private patient, tho legally he can. But if he does he does so at expense of a huge legal battle with the treasury dept attorneys, he may win or lose (the narco agents do not hesitate to fix such doctors with bum raps) and has legal expense, professional shame, crusade etc. no support from the profession, and possibility of losing his license. So all the doctors have collapsed and thrown in their cards.

The AMA-ABA-Ploscows report is outline of above legal situation, and comments, tho mildly, on the attempt of narco department to extend their power by lawsuits and harassment, and rebukes narco department for trying historically to force the Harrison Act to mean that doctors can’t treat patients with junk. The narco department has been put down on some crucial test cases —tho generally if a crucial case which will CLEARLY determine their limits is going against them, they do not prosecute further but drop action so no clear decision gets on record.

For outline of above situation see series of articles by Prof. Lindesmith³⁹ in the Nation, and in various learned journals. He develops in detail the calculated steps the narco department took to put the whole medical scene under their control. If can write Lindesmith and digest his information IT’S A SCANDAL. Further corroboration of same in the new book by Indiana University Press pps. 70-82.

In addition there are a few doctors here in NYC who have taken the bull by the horns and tried ambulatory treatment—and I spent a month with one in situation I mentioned in last letter. Well this Dr. Gilbert Grossman has 15 years battling Anslinger and has an AWFUL tale to tell—constant agent harassment of him and his patients, the agents go to wholesale drug houses and warn them against this Grossman. They burn down all the pharmacies (i.e. warn pharmacies on him)—send Treasury Tax agents to trip him up on fees—try to set up legal pitfalls where they can get him in jail. He’s under half a dozen counts of indictment now. I presume he’s actually quite honest—as honest as any doctor anyway. The other Dr. Freyman who treated addicts for a while was finally forced out of business by pressure from hysterical junkies and agents. Also a Dr. Nyswander an analyst who treats junkies has her harassment tale to tell. Also Lindesmith in Indiana has been pressured indirectly to shut up—thru complaints to his State Univ. trustees etc.—there’s been a shakeup there, so he’s free again. At least that’s the pure rumor I hear. Also Dr. Bowman who authored the LaGuardia Report on marijuana speaks of all sorts of pressure to suppress his report, etc. etc. all the way down the line anybody who’s had anything to do with narco problem from a non-Anslinger bureaucracy angle.

The second thing to understand is that the whole narco hysteria and confusion is as result of Anslinger’s control of INFORMATION that gets channeled thru mass media, congressional committees, etc. Only in last few years has there been a non-official breakthrough of people getting up on their hind legs and yelling, like now. The narco department feeds narco stories and statements to the papers and they are published as patriotic duty. The information fed thus has been way out of line, absolute lies sometimes. Like there is an Anslinger statement in the thirties that marijuana was a more vicious and destructive habit than heroin even. This when he was expanding narco bureau activities to take in marijuana in the face of the LaGuardia Report which for all practical publicity and informational purposes was suppressed. Beyond that there is active effort to distort and suppress information, such as this Indiana U. book.

The reason for all this surrealist activity is that the larger Anslinger’s position and bureau, the more power he got. Simple case of a cancerous type bureaucracy. If junk were legalized d la England, i.e. junkies went to doctors to get cured or supplied, the whole junk black market would collapse and all the crime attendant on it would disappear, there’d be no more illegal junk or junkies, and the narco bureau of how many thousand people would have no function at all. They’d all be out of a job. The point is they know it, and the narco bureau’s activities are consciously (with rationalizations etc.) intended to perpetuate the problem so they don’t go out of business. This isn’t hot air I’ve seen documents to prove it. Or at least make it obvious. For instance Dr. Grossman has a friend, a retired federal agent, who kept a diary, the Treasury men broke into his house stole a copy, he made it into a fictional novel with Grossman, I read it and am handing it on Tuesday to Rev. [Norman] Eddy of the East Harlem Protestant Parish—a friendly liberal who works with junkies but doesn’t know what he’s up against because he thinks the whole narco mess is not intentional and so like Miss Harrison thinks it’s just a confusion of laws, with Anslinger a fall guy and not the real monster operative he is.

The point is how did this immense mass of misinformation brainwash the whole public on two facts (I) that marijuana is both vicious and habit-forming and 2) that junkies are criminals and not medical cases? Aside from lunatic prudes, the whole smog of misinformation comes directly from the propaganda activities of the federal narco bureau.

Well, in the last few years enough people have smoked pot to know the score on that, and the heroin problem has got so bad it’s becoming a J.D. problem and the whole structure begins to collapse and so there’s the beginning of independent activity, the few liberal groups, judges, etc. in NY begin to speak up and now exchange info in NYC and now on a larger national basis.

I think that there is sufficient info now at hand so that if someone intelligent could investigate and integrate it all and get everybody’s story, it might be possible to blow up the whole federal narco system.

However the simplest way to solve the problem would be to get AMA to take a stand that henceforth they will back and defend doctors who treat junkies—the government would then have to back down because the Law is on the doctors’ side. But getting the AMA to do anything like that is perhaps more difficult than making a public scandal of Anslinger’s activities.

Below is a partial list of people who have assembled information of all kinds, historical, legal, personal—who have never gotten all together to pool their information—tho some such movement seems on the way now. [ ... ]

I went to all this detail above to give ground and reason and sources of information to indicate that the narco problem is not the laws but the narco bureau and Anslinger as head of it, because having been in and out of junk-pot etc. scene for 15 years, I was actually surprised that my understanding of the problem was not similar to Emily Harrison’s as regards Anslinger—and hope that she, or someone, could take time to check on the actual situation—because until that’s understood, if what I say above is true, nothing will solve the narco problem but complete overhaul, backtracking and/or demolishment of the federal narco bureau by means of a Pulitzer Prize type political examination of the activities of the bureau in the N.Y. Times.

I’ve gone rushing around the last month trying to interconnect as many sources of information as I could as fast and sloppily as possible because I think I’ll be leaving the country in a few weeks for long trip and the more I’ve talked to people the more opens up the possibility that something could be done. There are plenty of doctors and psychoanalysts and judges and experts and junkies who are willing to help. [ ... ]

Center for Personality Research, Dr. Tim Leary, part of Harvard Grad school—also be helpful for statements etc. I have been up working with them on psilocybin—magic (hallucinogenic) mushroom synthetic-[Aldous] Huxley, Alan Watts, [Arthur] Koestler, Robert Lowell, etc. also. One further problem is, research and spread of use of the really great useful non-habit forming chemicals like peyote and lysergic acid and mushrooms will be balked as long as government bureaucracy controls national psyche on subject of drugs, doctors and analysts are bad enough without getting politicians on top of that. Government control of benevolent drugs like marijuana means government control of perception. Means government control of STATES OF AWARENESS. (I think this is the significance of the whole problem.)

I better quit,

Allen

 

[ ... ] Furthest and worst horror is attempt by Anslinger to apply his methods and thinking to world drug problem thru the UN. You should see what’s been going on there. He’s taken over the UN drug committee, apparently. It’s really incredible that Harrison should think he’s just trying to do his best as victim of a bad law. He’s MAKING IT INTERNATIONAL.

While all this mad hypocrisy is in control there are at this minute 25,000 junkies here in NY sick, stealing, scoring furtively, getting busted, suffering the tortures of the damned.

The way to avoid further spread of junk addiction particularly among young—as it is now becoming a big thing in NY—is to cut off the black market supply of heroin. The way to do that is to take the profit out of it. The way to do that is to have doctors supply the junk to junkies who need it, and will get it legally or if necessary illegally. That eliminates likelihood of new users spreading.

If junk addiction is permanently curable—nobody even is really sure of it —then let doctors, hospitals, psychos try any way they want. That prevents confirmed junkies who should be allowed to maintain from being victims of bureaucratic system.

It also encourages medical and social experimentation toward cure for those who can be cured. Cops and jail totally irrelevant murder here.

Marijuana is totally other problem and has no relation to junk use any more than alcohol does except under present system where they are both purposely confused as interchangeable dope by Anslinger. General public doesn’t even know the difference due to narco bureau and newspaper fictions.

 

 

[Ginsberg had the ability to cram a lot of information into a brief letter. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France] to James Laughlin [New York, NY] late April 1961

 

Dear James L:

 

How am I supposed to address you? Dear Jim?—am in Paris, so’s Gregory, he got your letters and has replied?? already. Yes fine to use the 2 prose poems in antho—sooner check comes the happier I’ll be, every little bit helps we’re down to $10 as it is—tho I expect money soon from Kaddish.

Been correcting proofs on new Burroughs book the Soft Machine—also remarkable—and yakking with Gregory. Orlovsky here too getting laid and going to gym classes and French classes and writing down dreams.

Saw your remarks re [Thomas] Merton in letter to Gregory and was fascinated by possibility that he had not ever actually experienced some break-through visionary state. I would be curious his reaction to the Magic Psalm poem in Kaddish since it’s practically a catholic type prayer. If you see him again and if he ever sees my book.

Everything absolutely lovely here—we’ll go off somewhere and write new epics—see Burroughs in a few weeks, he’s back in Tangier—maybe Kerouac come soon if all well—hope to go to Moscow too have invite to stay with Konstantin Siminov a Steinbeck type Moscow government bureaucrat.

Cuba thing [Bay of Pigs Invasion, April 17, 1961] really is the bankruptcy of U.S. “liberalism,” at long last, now maybe some kind of real Left get started. Seemed all incredible here and the unanimity of assent to Kennedy also nuts.

Can always reach me thru City Lights or American Express Paris will forward—am in haste or would relax and write goofier.

Love

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Ginsberg’s letters to his father were always filled with political conversation, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco gave him plenty to write about. In this letter Allen began by remarking on his Uncle Max’s death, but quickly moved on to the political situation.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Tangier, Morocco] to Louis Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ]

June 12, 1961

 

Dear Lou:

 

Sad to hear Max had died—and whom to write condolences to now? I saw less of him the last few years but when I did we were pretty close and I always felt for him, in thought, and that apartment in the Bronx was landmark always —was there last year again looking at it knowing I’d not see it much ever more, it was a mellow place for Max-Elanor then, Eugene must be sad too.

Say hello to everyone at picnic—I wrote long letter to [Aunt] Honey yesterday, details on Paris, for Ruth and her.

Glad you had poem in Second Coming and Liberation—I also had prose piece in Second Coming— I hear it is out. I haven’t their address. Can you send them a card or note telling them to send me a copy of the issue with my and your writings and also remind them they owe me money which I have not received and which I need—so tell them to send it here to above address. They said they’d pay me I think it was $50 and that payment is overdue by now if the piece is out. Have you time to drop them a note? I would but I don’t have the address.

Glad you are getting Liberation as it is a sincere magazine compared to most. [interruption, Corso typed a page to Allen’s letter and Allen continued] Gregory just came upstairs, read your letter and sat down at typewriter so that was the result—he’s very funny—I live on top of a roof, a little tile room in hot Mediterranean clime, and that leads to a glass enclosed sun-shack, and that leads to a little terrace overlooking rooftops and Tangier Bay and parapets of Spain (as last time, I’m around the block from hotel I was last time)—all this costs $20 a month. Gregory has a slightly larger room downstairs for $14 a month. Peter walks around the Arab streets and keeps diaries. Burroughs around the corner in his old room just finished novel (The Soft Machine) now cuts up newspapers and photographs to make collages in spare time (weird juxtapositions of news stories, Kennedy stepping off airplanes onto Queen Elizabeth’s forehead)—everybody busy. I’m typing up journals and answering letters. The weather is great. Lots of young beatniks suddenly in town swinging with the poor Arabs buying old clothes and smoking pot (it’s legal). Paul Bowles takes us to his favorite cafe on mountain-cliff overlooking vast blue crawling hide of the sea and we sit silent watching the universe, everybody tranquil. Gregory and Peter and I at nite on roof discuss galaxies. We eat 50¢ shish kebab meals in dark Arab fry restaurants—sometimes go to European quarter and get high-class French meals for a buck—cheaper than Mexico here —in fact this place is more interesting and weirder to live in and happier than Paris at the moment for me—so everything’s fine. Since independence Tangier no longer is international free port trading post and so’s more tranquil less paranoiac less Europe-Arab conflict, calmer fewer people less business less tourists less surface confusion, more calm to live in and cheaper. You can get $180 Yugoslav boat here from NY—ought to come for a few weeks sometime.

Anyway as I say glad you reading Liberation, seems more active radical than the old-time-radical-new-liberal-weeklies. I agree generally with Finch the guy who resigned more than the other editors in disapproving of Castro dictatorship; and Finch’s ideas on that are based on more specific and accurate information than generally circulated in U.S.—excellent detailed accurate info in previous issues of Liberation attacking Castro by Cuban anarchist-pacifist groups who are persecuted there. Do you ever see I.F. Stone’s Newsletter? That’s the most balanced political comment and reporting I see from the U. S.A. I get it regularly, someone put me on sub list. Enclosed if I have sample around.

Now this above (disapproving of Castro police state) not to be taken as change of opinion on my part as to complete vileness of U.S. government and U.S. people in last year regarding Cuba. Nor if I were Castro am I sure I’d be able to do any better with Cuba than he’s doing, given the U.S. for neighbor.

All last year I was complaining about the CIA and I think by now what sounded in me to be eccentric has been put into perspective by events and come to general public consciousness, realized—the whole complaint I had then is now the general U.S. complaint. What sounded in Castro as Mussolini-hysteria—his screaming about U.S. attack—has also been justified by event.

I wondered how you reacted to the Cuban invasion and if that made sense of what you had taken to be mere communist propaganda before, i.e. accusations made by Russia and Castro that U.S. was preparing military blow at Cuba? This was dismissed as paranoia for a year before it happened.

According to Gallup poll at invasion time 80% of U.S. people, on basis of U.S. mass communication data—including NY Times, etc.—thought that Cuban masses were against Castro. I remember [Uncle] Leo thought so, too. I disputed that point wildly and was put down for it, as a “dupe.” I was merely reporting fact and amazed to realize that all the liberals even were completely misinformed to the point to mind-control or brainwash on the facts of the case. Now the fact is no longer ambiguous and it is generally reported in U.S. press (NYHerald Trib, Times, etc.) that majority of Cubans are behind Castro. I been warning, this total reversal of public information is the result of a deliberate manipulation of information reaching the U.S. public and until people stop believing the newspapers in the U.S. they will have as inaccurate information and opinions on the cold wars as they have on the beat generation, to give an example close to home.

What was really shocking was that the old-line liberals and socialists like yourself after 20 years of McCarthyism are completely out of contact with any kind of perspective on what’s happened to America.

Put it this way—to my generation, the Cuban scene is similar to the old Spanish Civil War scene—with many of the same stresses and interior conflicts.

I don’t see any way out except full public investigation of CIA activities in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Formosa, Korea, Laos, Congo etc. for the last 10 years —total reversal of policy of secret manipulation of foreign policy and hiding or withholding news and info from public—the extent of which nobody knows fully but what I already know has made me gasp with horror and has justified the worst Russian tirades in the U.N.

I also see last week’s banning of Communist Party as formal police state action by the U.S.

In fact at this point I think the U.S. is too far gone and now useless to complain since I don’t see the people of the U.S. wake enough to take their own life up again and begin to swing politically in some imaginative free expression.

The reason I kept yelling at you is in a sense you represent the intelligent liberal symbol in my mind—the people who are supposed to be depended on to be able to defend themselves from right wing police state—the stable progressive old school—and I see you inundated by History, by a U.S.A. that would have been inconceivable in Roosevelt’s day, by a U.S. that is suicidal and unable to straighten out in time to prevent itself from being blown up by the communist world, and that will steadily lose ground and degenerate and get more right wing every year, no matter what party is in power.

The only way out for America now as far as I can see is socialism, return of government power from oligarchic holding companies and military power groups that run things—industry and information-propaganda. (We do NOT have a free press. Period.) (Actually about 8 people in the U.S.A. determine policy for majority of newspapers and TV and radio) (that’s why it’s possible to have such massive factual misinformation as on Cuba) (i.e. one year of constant information totally at variance in factual data as attitude from British, French and Moroccan papers, to say nothing of Russian or Chilean)—and shift of U.S. economy from present monopoly capitalism to some relaxed socialistic form wherein a shift can be planned from conspicuous consumer and military production to world-integrated useful production for undeveloped countries. (This be [Arnold] Toynbee’s suggestion too). Which means a lower standard of living for U.S. and a more meaningful life maybe, at least be of some use to the rest of the world instead of a mockery and horror of fake democracy gone nuts. More and more from outside U.S. everybody digs U.S. as approaching some vast crisis which people inside U.S.A. are almost completely unconscious of, as if everything was well in the refrigerator and history be escaped.

I.e. to French socialists, the “world struggle” is not the cold war at all but struggle against “power” monger groups in U.S. and in Russia both, and it makes very little difference if the U.S. power group loses, in fact it might be preferable for the red power group to win since at least it’s a power that’s still ALIVE in the sense that the U.S. is dead from the neck up and more retrogressive and less promising of flexible development than the red power groups. I could imagine the world developing and relaxing (maybe) after a total red victory ; but after a total U.S. victory I would see nothing but medieval scenes of Cuban-Guatemalan horror sort of, a McCarthy-Kennedy-Max Lerner police state, I’m not making sense.

Anyway, what I’m saying is, some new sense of a serious fix is coming into consciousness on the American scene, is it not? Something’s got to give, I hope it’s the right wing not the left—at least there’s the beginning of some open fight—Republicans calling for war on Cuba and Democrats beginning to draw back from that and be neutral.

It simply is a shame that there is no real progressive party because now there is a progressive scene possible, i.e. historical demand for reversal of U.S. policy on Latin America so that we encourage peaceful socialism—which neither party is willing to admit—outside the U.S.A. and even inside if necessary

OK, Love,

 

Allen

[Ginsberg was able to fill even the smallest postcard with a lot of detail.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Marrakech, Morocco] to LeRoi Jones [New York, NY] ca. July 18, 1961

Dear LeRoi:

 

Spending a week here in Marrakech with Paul Bowles, this is the maddest teahead city I’ve ever seen, a vast plaza where at dusk when it’s cool all sorts of acrobats, fortune tellers, snake charmers and shade drum and dance groups gather circles of crowds and collect coins—also a huge labyrinth market with alleys covered by bamboo against sunlight, selling Aladdin lamps and clothes. Can wander for hours lost—and outside the walled city is the desert and Atlas mountains. The people are all heads spiritually and modernization here is killing the best and most humane aspects of the life—nationalistic “progressives” want to close down on pot, close the markets and square and rebuild with U.S. style supermarket architecture. Also everybody sleeps with everybody.

Allen

 

 

 

[While in Tangier, Ginsberg and Orlovsky decided to go their separate ways, due in part to William Burroughs’ treating Peter like Allen’s prat boy. Allen was unable or unwilling to defend Peter from Burroughs’ abuse, so Peter left Morocco with the intention of touring the Mideast alone. Immediately, Allen hoped they would reconcile and connect at some point in the future. Within a few days Allen forwarded Peter’s mail to him and included the first of many letters written during their separation. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Tangier, Morocco] to Peter Orlovsky [Athens, Greece] August 2, 1961

 

Dear Peter:

 

Just got up—have to run to PO to send this so be short—been up 2 days on O [opium] with [Timothy] Leary and Gregory [Corso]. Enclosed note from Buenos Aires. How are you and how’s Athens? No other mail come but this so far, will send anything on as it comes. Beautiful to see you ride off and I felt good that you were off into world alone, just tearful that we had been quarreling with each other and separating in soul but that will be OK I hope next time we meet. I felt lost when you said “years” [from now] but if years alas, then years alas I’ll still cry to see yr old eyes. Leary came in, said he saw you at airport—living downstairs in hotel, lots happened, he dug Gregory, gets along with Bill [Burroughs] politely and vice versa. He invited Bill to Harvard in September and Bill accepted so that will take place in September, he pay Bill’s way over and small salary but not the $2000 planned because no money. We all went to Ahmed’s⁴⁰ new apartment (great balcony view) last night, and had been going to fair to listen to music. I took a few mushrooms and felt sick and began kissing Pamela Stevenson on Blvd Pasteur, I think I will start chasing girls again. Leary off to Copenhagen [LSD Conference] later today; Ansen also leaving this morn for Venice, that leaves me and Gregory here and Bill and the boys there—still a sort of cold war. They gave Mark (the friend of Mike Portman lives downstairs) majoun and he got panicked at Bowles because everyone was ignoring him, so Jane [Bowles] and I and Paul and Leary held his hand and got him back and the next day on O I sat up with him and had long talk and now he is much more sociable and open and independent and I also gave him my flute since he is a musician. Gregory and I started article on Cannes [Film Festival 1961]—an interview, was OK but boring all about Sal Mineo. Then we cut it up and it sounds wild—sample:

“Emptiness haunted by Jack Kennedy. Talking about windowsills of cold Sal Mineo Liberace secrecy, how would world war 2 clodhop strange? Assuredly American film presents films of attention. Musically they’re really enough. Hollywood is reporters and roses? And a producer in a slimy flower festival, he got into string bean conversations.” This was done by taking cut pieces and reweaving poetic sentences from words—that is, half cut up half mental reweaving.

Bill still cold, so that’s that, I feel depressed in that I’ve lost touch with you, and also out of direct contact with Bill, and Mike Portman mainly in the way, tho maybe it’s just my own schemings. Greg and Leary went to Casino last nite with [Francis] Bacon and lost a few bucks—I’m down to a hundred dollars. Leary says he’ll send us railfare from Paris next week, so Gregory and I will go to Copenhagen I think. Leary says lots of girls there so I’ll try girlies. Ansen made date with me for to try his boys but not done that yet. From Copenhagen can get to Berlin etc. or Scandinavia. But I don’t know what I do next. Bill can’t take mushrooms he says he gets horrors. Ian [Somerville] built a flicker machine it’s easy—Gysin made it sound hard. You just get a cylinder of black paper and divide it in twenty squares and cut out 10 of them around the roll and that’s that. Gregory afraid I’ll fall for cut-ups I think and I will experiment more than I did, since it was useful to hop up and intensify the Cannes interview. Bill leaving for Paris in a week and we’ll leave probably around then too—I’ll keep writing you gossip. How is Parthenon? I mailed your letter to [your sister] Marie Monday. I haven’t writ Jack yet. I feel lost but I guess that’s good for me I’ll have to grow up like Lafcadio and learn to be independent. The maid sick, so I sent her to the doctor again and bought her $2 worth of medicine, some kind of sulfa drug for her pussy and vanilone pills for liver like you had. Please write me soon so we keep thread unbroken, at least a little diamond thread.

XXXXX Love,

 

Allen

 

 

 

[As Ginsberg traveled he kept up correspondence with dozens of friends. One of these was Philip Lamantia, who had experienced visions of his own. At the time Philip was in the process of becoming a much more devout Catholic. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Athens, Greece] to Philip Lamantia [San Francisco, CA] September 7, 1961

 

Dear Philip:

 

What is this abstract calling on Christ all the time? How can there even be one (I’m talking to myself as usual), much less called a name like god christ all that? Been with Burroughs for several months, & he says cut up language in order to get out of mere word consciousness, leave behind the hypnotic logos which is a lie located in the cortex—cut up a practical means of annihilating poetry too. A koan type mind-breaker. I’ve separated from Peter. Cut up Love! Nothing sacred, Zen-man! I vomited from fear, as usual, like an aging soprano. I’m going on to see the Sphinx—how are you?

Love

 

Allen

[After several months traveling alone, Ginsberg and Orlovsky decided to team up again. Allen’s plans were to meet Gary Snyder in India and travel with him and Joanne Kyger for awhile. He wanted to live in India for awhile, and Allen hoped that Peter would stay with

him.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Athens, Greece] to Peter Orlovsky [Haifa, Israel]

October 21, 1961

 

Dear Peter:

 

I had been sending you mail Amer Express Istanbul from Tangier, including magazines and a package (letter and book gift Fra Angelico) from Janine [Pommy Vega]; when I got to Greece there were two earlier letters from me I also had forwarded to Istanbul (but here they told me the real address was Turk Express Istanbul not American Express)—so there is a lot of stuff following you that way. Then finally after trip to Crete earlier this month and after I wrote your mother with a letter for her to send you, I received all your letters from Beirut and around the 10th or 12th of Oct I sent you letters and postcards there including a 20 dollar bill in one letter since it sounded like you were broke selling your blood and your check not arrived according to your mother; then I received yesterday your last note from Beirut saying you were heading off to Damascus, Jerusalem, and I should write you in Haifa. I don’t understand how you going to pick up mail in Haifa which on map is way up north in Israel; but I guess you will be there around the 2nd or 3rd of November to receive VA. check from your mother.

I not sure what plans are for me but will make sure I am in Haifa then and be around, and will leave note in Amer Express address you sent me there, saying where I am living. You do the same yes, so we not lose contact again. I can get boat from here to Haifa for 20 dollars with bunk-bed. So I will go there and wait. I hope you get this or I will be waiting there forever? I also wrote you extra postcard to Embassy Beirut saying I would try to reach you at the Haifa address you sent me October 15. Your note sounded like none of my letters had reached you by the time you were leaving in “Taxey” to go to Damascus.

Gary Snyder says he and Joanne his wife will be in Bombay on Jan 1, 1962 and I should meet them there, go on tour meet monks with him. He says he’ll need money and will give poetry readings in universities there and wants me to do it too, I wrote him okay. Tho I don’t feel like singing any more. I guess you read if you want. He, Gary, sounds great, I wrote him what happened with Bill etc. in Tangier. Enclosed letter from Irving [Rosenthal] I got this month with NY gossip. Ferlinghetti’s Journal came out [Journal for the Protection of All Beings], so did issue of Kulchur and I have them; I mailed you a copy of New Orleans Outsider with your [Snail] poem in it. Ferlinghetti writes me where are you he wants to publish yr poetry, I sent him yr Beirut address; Gregory keeps asking why you don’t write him, Amer Embassy London, he sad thinking you disappeared. He was broke and lived with Colin Wilson on south coast of England. Then sent article to magazine and got some money and now lives near zoo and finishing manuscript of poems Apples, and hit Norman Mailer for insulting beatniks at a London party one night. Bill was in Harvard and Leary wrote that all was quiet and OK but you see what Irving says. Leary sounds a little sad, send him a postcard encourage? I got to write Jack still.

I have 250 dollars when I get to Israel. Prefer to go overland but want to get there by New Year in Bombay, meet Gary, because he’ll know all the monks and I said I’d read with him.

I stopped smoking for 2 weeks solid, then started again, but can stop anytime now, it’s just that it makes me nervous. To stop. I get irritable touchy. I got some O [opium] from friend coming from India and used it twice, once I wrote huge letter about Politics and Consciousness to Howie Schulman (Hotel Presidente, Vedado, Havana Cuba) for his magazine there (Arriba). He wants yr poems too.

I packed up books and papers and mailed them back to States; also packed up rock-and-roll and mailed them all to Romanova in Moscow. So now my knapsack lighter. I got some shirts. Meanwhile I been here in Greece all along, read Odyssey and Iliad, and been in country most of the time to ruined cities and shepherd goatbell music valleys—Mycenae, Crete, Delphi, Olympia-I was going up north to Mt. Athos monasteries but time getting short for India and want to meet you in Haifa and it save money if I take this cheap boat. Had a lot of strange dreams in which I had amnesia or was whirled around by winds. Made it with a few boys here but cost money a little and they weren’t so interested but I dig the cock. I live across street from bar where whore boys gather, I know them all. Also hang around Zonars and Flocas cafes and see intelligent old literary men here and they all like me. They’re all bugged at Gregory who apparently teased everyone, threw fits etc....

Lessee what else to add. I get endless mail and still answer. Not wrote much poetry but lots of dreams, and some notebooks. Empty Mirror book is out and looks okay. Money I got is advance on Italian translation plus 20 dollars Gregory sent me back plus 10 dollars from New Directions. I sold article to Show Business Illustrated on Cannes, had 750 dollars, Gregory lost 200 gambling and owes me that, spent the rest traveling plus 100 extra was his for helping; now they want to censor the word shit so I wrote them no even if I have to pay them back 450. Still waiting to hear. [It was never published.]

Sorry I did not see Istanbul and Cairo and Damascus but maybe see strange places inland overland to India if do that. Be sure and send for your mail in Beirut and Istanbul and send Amer Express I dollar they charge nowadays for forwarding. I read Melville [Holy Land Travels] notes years ago and don’t remember them except that was my idea, to see the Bible landscape he mentions, also he has long poem “Clarel” I read parts of about his trip to Jerusalem area. Okay Petey I sign off and see you in 12 days I guess if you finally get this, and you not delay forever in Petra. I have 2 huge maps of Middle East to Persia. Also possible boat from Israel to India. Maybe I, we, miss further Arab countries and rush to India fast. They say Bombay and India is expensive because dysentery dangerous to eat native food and there are no hotels like in west, just big hotels cost 3 dollars a day but with good food included. That Bowles says and all others I met.

Thank you for all letters sorry you not receive mine, some were crazy. I was lonesome for you.

Love to you from your old Lover,

Allen

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Tel Aviv, Israel] to Eugene Brooks [New York, NY] November 25, 1961

 

Dear Gene:

 

Think I wrote you sometime back but not heard nuttin except thru Louis. Been in Israel a month now—traveled a little, spoke to lots of people, lived with businessmen and artists as guest, so not spent much money, got interviewed a lot, earned a little loot with poem in Jerusalem Post newspaper and getting my poems translated into Hebrew. Basically it’s kind of a strange scene here—for the very reason that you, for instance, wouldn’t necessarily think of moving to Israel. Well imagine the psychology of a bunch of Jewish folk who think that all Jews should come here and get together. So it’s a little uncomfortable this excessive hang up on invisible Jewishness. Main justification for Israel is as place for refugees and for that it’s good. But then once all those Jews get together they stare each other in the face and wonder what’s it all about? So the main opinion you hear here is that this is the place to forget about being Jewish once and for all, this from the intelligent sensitive types (all but the wild orthodox religious). For the rest there is plenty dissatisfaction that the old idealist socialist Russian kibbutz spirit which first settled the land is fading at advent of prosperity, new middle class, American and German money flooding the holy land with Western-Hollywood styles of living, slow loosening of PURPOSE, which once everyone felt. Arab pressure holds things together spiritually. But there are some contradictions here that aren’t settled and will have to be—huge Arab minority, with lots of guilt feeling for the refugees who were (I now learn) pushed out with considerable unofficial Jewish terror. Some Jews say, good riddance to bad rubbish. Others, my god, we’re raping democracy. Everyone agrees the Government is hypocritical however in its official goody-goody attitude as far as propaganda. Meanwhile the Arabs are repressed here (partly for military reasons, mostly for old fashioned middle class Yiddish intolerance) —and anyway it’s a Jewish state, so even if an Arab is patriotic and wants to integrate he can’t really in the long run without become a Jew, which is absurd. So the “good” Arabs are all neurotic, that is, goofily displaced socially—they’re not really part of the country since it’s a Jewish state. That’s 10 percent of the population. Another 50 percent is arabized oriental Jews who are more like Arabs than Europeans. (From Yemen Morocco etc.)—and since the Europe whites run the country (tho they’re a minority) they’re big cultural chaos—i.e. it takes more than clothes and radios and cars to “educate” the Orientals—who don’t want to be educated like that anyway, but who slowly slip into the pattern. I haven’t been to Kibbutz yet. Will go this week and in 2 weeks hope to catch ship to India from Israel port of Elat. Still vague exactly how, investigating now. Meanwhile saw the spot where Christ changed bread [sic: water] to wine and multiplied loaves and gave sermon on mount, stood on the mount in fact, and wandered in Galilee and even tried (unsuccessfully) to walk on Lake Galilee.

Listen, here is cause of this letter. I received a note from Marie Orlovsky saying that her mother Kate AND Lafcadio both had been taken to Central Islip hospital and shut up. Peter Orlovsky arrived here a week ago and is writing her to find out what happened and what if anything needs to be done. Marie sounds a little bewildered. It’s a weird stroke, two at once. I thought they’d finally have to put Lafcadio in. But I didn’t expect they’d take the mother—she’s not nuts at all and doesn’t belong there. I think he must have got violent, she hysterical and by the time cops arrived they both looked crazy. Presumably after short observation period they will send her out. I wrote Marie to call you up and see you if she needs any law advice. Also told her to borrow a few dollars (5 or 10) from you if she needs and is broke—if she does I’ll send it to you. I don’t know what her situation is, she probably needs someone to talk over the whole problem with, and figure what she should do. Main practical problem I think is Mrs. Orlovsky’s apartment. I think Marie is there now—she wrote she might have to give it up. Could you drive over there if she doesn’t call you, and see if she is handling the situation alright, and give her any advice she seems to need? I told her, if she moved, to leave Peter O’s manuscripts with you, they’re valuable, shouldn’t be lost.

The welfare people were taking care of her mother and probably would make sure that the apartment was kept for her till she gets out. I am assuming there’s nothing serious wrong with Mrs. Orlovsky—I doubt there is. But she’s deaf and may have trouble explaining herself at Central Islip Hospital. But the welfare people should be able to get her out since they know her quite well over long period of time. I just don’t know if Marie has enough savoir faire to know who to contact and what to do in the situation, so I wrote her to talk it over with you (or Connie maybe)—maybe she needs advice. So if you can drive over and see if she’s at the apartment in Northport—it’s 155 Main Street, Top Floor, I think. I’ll get right address before I close letter. Send me a note if you can. OK—Later.

Love,

 

Allen

 

 

 

[For political reasons Ginsberg and Orlovsky were not able to leave Israel through any of the neighboring Islamic countries, so they had to go to India via Africa. In the meantime Allen’s brother, Eugene, was able to help straighten out the difficulties with Peter’s family back in New York.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Mombasa, Kenya, Africa] to Eugene Brooks [Plainview, NY] January 27, 1962

 

Dear Gene:

 

Been in Kenya and Tanganyika the last few weeks—Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa the port towns in East Africa—Arab, Persian, Bantu, Swahili, Portuguese, German and English talk and architecture left over from 12 centuries of shipping and colonization. Mombasa a charming town—live in an Indian hotel with mosquito nets and eat curried prawns for 45¢ a dish. We took bus inland to Mt. Kilimanjaro and around thru national game reserves and thru Masai warrior territory—saw giraffes, zebras, ostriches, lions, hippos in big savannah grassland plains—thru to Nairobi and living around in cheap African hotels eating and mixing with negro Africans—all week there. Also attended huge political rally at Nairobi African stadium and saw Jomo Kenyatta himself make big speech. Also was in town for Tom Mboya (local politician) wedding and went to his wedding dance and met all sorts of politicians and hangers on to new negro nationalism here. Also hitch-hiked with member of Kenya special police who told me how he used to torture Africans in the old Mau Mau emergency. (Stand them all nite in cold mountain air in a barrel of cold water or shoot them up till confessions of information.) Now back in Mombasa, and in about 10 days, cheap $50 deck-class passage to India. Should land in Bombay around the 15th of next month, leaving here February 6 also saw the Masai as I said above—big tall funny negroes like Lucien’s friend Miles Forst—wear dry-blood colored robes and carry spears and hang huge rings from their ears and eat naught but milk, blood and meat. But very friendly and funny types—awkward, intelligent, always poking each other in the ribs and making funny remarks, with those wild ears. A far cry from the duty-ridden sadist from the Kenya Special Police.

Reading a huge load of Indian books now—old Hindu classics and modern novels and Gandhi Autobiography—that last would interest you—when he got out of English law school he was lost about how to start a career, reminded me of you (or myself for that matter when I first looked for a job after college.) Anyway finally, about ready for last leg of India trip and be there soon.

I bought a pair of khaki shorts so am all equipped for 3° below equator where I am. Also take anti dysentery and anti malaria tablets and got all kinds of smallpox yellow fever and cholera shots.

I hear via Marie that Mrs. Orlovsky is still in the bughouse. Sounds like the bureaucracy wheels are still grinding slow and small. Does it look like she’ll be hung up there very long? When you think that this kind of hopeless victimage is compounded a billion times all over Asia and Africa to say nothing of Russia and Balkans and Baltics, etc.! Does it still look like police want her too? Marie and Peter to write you some family history, which he says he’ll do this nite. He received letter yesterday from his sister.

OK—That’s all for now. Gregory Corso is living at Hotel Albert on 10th Street in Village, if you have time to call him up and maybe see him. He’s charming. OK.

Love,

 

Allen

[Finally Ginsberg and Orlovsky arrived in India and found Snyder and Kyger in Delhi. Having left the manuscript for a new book, Reality Sandwiches, with City Lights before he left, Allen kept in close touch with Ferlinghetti via the mail. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Delhi, India] to Lawrence Ferlinghetti [San Francisco] February 25, 1962

 

Dear Larry:

 

India is MORE, yes, we met Gary a few days ago here in New Delhi and we leave day after tomorrow for Himalayas, go stay in Yoga forest school, talk to the Dalai Lama maybe, climb in snows, everything is fine. India has everything Mexico has, poverty and dead dogs, I saw a body scattered on RR tracks like toe cover of Kulchur only it was in 6 pieces, also it’s got hoods like Morocco and Moslems and shrouds and Indians like worse Bolivias and garbages like Peru and bazaars like Hong Kong’s and billion of people like nowhere I seen. So that’s all fine. I also have this backlog of 2 months mail, I’m woozy what with 16 cent morphine you can get here easy here, and sitting in a Jain temple dormitory to answer. Gary’s down street in the Hindu YMCA.

I got the check, fine. Actually cash is the best thing here since you get best black market rate for that exchange, but it’s too risky I suppose to send hundred dollar bills in mail so send on the other money in same type check. American Express cashes them, no trouble, and gives me travelers checks ok. I’ll be back in Bombay the end of March with Gary and Peter and Gary’s wife, so will pick up next mail there, I guess send the money on there by then.

Gary looks older and a little more domestic-acting now that he’s married; his face is more seamed and wrinkled and the baby look is gone, and he comes on very straight and simple—I haven’t seen him for 6 years and change is noticeable. He’s staying here till end of March, we’ll travel till then all together; and then he to Japan and Peter and I stay here till seen enough maybe a year, then go to Japan-Kyoto. Music here is great—night before last we went to hear farewell speech of a holyman who’s going to stop talking for the rest of his life —he’s 32 now—and a couple of the greatest musicians is a drummer (tabla finger drums) and lady sarod (guitar drone sound) serenaded him improvised for an hour straight, ending in trance-celestial speed—such classical music as I never heard.

So far spent 2 days in Bombay and sped here to meet Gary and we’ve hung around met a few writers, walked thru alleys and streets and saw Nehru give election speech and shopped for a little Tibet statue for Whalen and ate cheap 25 cent curry dinners, I haven’t settled into any routine here yet and am disorganized and got too much unanswered mail. Anyway India got more than anywhere else, especially great cheap horse carriages to take you around cities for 15 cents a hop, lovely to lean back and clop clop thru fantastically crowded streets full of barbers and street shoe-repairmen and bicycle rickshaws and Sikhs in turbans and big happy cows everywhere stealing cabbages from push-carts.

Your spring list Lowry and Russians is great. Poems of Thaw is, comparatively, drear title. If the poems are really lively why not something lively like Thaw Heads or Moscow Gold or Beat Moscow or Hip Moscow or or Red Cats—yes RED Cats!~ (subtitle Poems of the Thaw) Red Cats sell better.⁴¹ But are the poems good? I hope.

Send my proofs, or have Villiers send them, to Bombay. I think the book’s OK. If you think anything should be left out, do it, and let me know. Have you got from LeRoi [Jones] the tape of Artaud’s voice I mailed him? That may help, for translation.

Make next check even 250 and send me a few copies Howl and Kaddish, 9 dollars’ worth. First thing I found in Bombay when stept off ship was messages from Time, apparently they’re finally reviewing Kaddish—so maybe it sell better hence? Apparently it’s selling less than Howl.

That’s astounding about your being a poppa after all.⁴² The rich get richer, good thing you adopted that babe, he [sic: she] brought you blessings. Doubled congratulations to Kirby from the Indic depths of bacheloral morphia. Send interesting books and pamphlets slow boat to Bombay, they’ll eventually reach me. [...]

Love,

 

Allen

 

If anyone wants to sell Tibetan cheap statuary rajput nice miniature paintings and Indian dancing statues, you can get crazy copies and originals here real cheap for export. Be a good business. I’ll send you some souvenirs when I get settled long enuf to pack and ship gifties.

 

 

[Allen’s year and a half in India was a period of most intensive correspondence as he tried to stay in touch with friends and carried on his literary life from halfway around the globe.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Bombay, India] to Gregory Corso [n.p.] April 19, 1962

 

Dear Gregory:

 

Received letters today about Phipps.⁴³ Yes, that’s a strange note. Weirdly harmonious. I guess every death is, from afar. Last week I heard from Irving [Rosenthal] and others that Elise Cowen committed suicide and that really gave me a turn. I had felt a little responsible for her welfare and hadn’t been much help to her when I was around. Always felt revulsion for the death smell in her hair and so always held myself distant from her when she lived upstairs on East Second St. I wish you’d sent me more details about Phipps. I don’t get it. Was he taking liquid amphetamine regularly? And did that wind up in overdose? I never heard of that before. Though everyone else that took amphetamine regularly wound up a thin-faced paranoiac nervous wreck like Elise. Peter’s girl Janine was making that scene with Bill Heine, and Huncke and Elise. What has happened to her? Ask Irving. Peter wants to know if she’s alright. She last wrote she was down to 95 pounds. Horror’s sure hung his hat in New York of late. I wrote Wilentz⁴⁴ I’m glad I didn’t stay. I would have surely come down with a broken leg or measles.

I feel fine. Last night I even gave a little poetry reading with Peter and Gary and read well and feel a little more okay nowadays, and I’ll begin writing again. I didn’t much since Tangier. Luckily, I still have the negative of the photo you asked for, plus some others you may not have seen from same roll. I enclose five of them. You can get them developed and use whatever. That old pix of you on Acropolis also I sent. I also got the nude ones of us. I’ll keep those negatives, did I ever send you copies? They’re real funny. Listen, things are very interesting and comfortable in India for living. All the things people said about horrors and heat and disease are a lot of exaggeration. It’s now mid-April, well into the hot season. I’m in Bombay and it’s warm, but not at all uncomfortable. If it ever got uncomfortable, all I got to do is get a third class train (third class very comfortable—you reserve a sleeping bunk 24 hours in advance, and settle down on train unbothered by crowding like settling on comfy private space on ship.) And costs nothing to cross all India that way, maybe $5 for a 2-day, 2,000 mile ride. Cheaper than hotel. And great huge cheap meals—Indie or European style for 45 cents in 19th-century appointed dining car. And ride up to Kashmir hill coolness or Darjeeling and Sikkim and Nepalese snows. All sorts of Himalayan summer resorts, cheap to live in with interesting Tibetans nearby camping on roadsides and selling prayer wheels. Anyway, if it gets hot, just go to Himalayas. I’ve been all over western foothills of same with Gary. All sorts of nice old British hill stations to retreat to. But I doubt it’s so hot it’s necessary. I’ll in any case probably head towards Sikkim up above Calcutta on Tibet border in a few weeks, for kicks.

Food quite good, we’ve been eating everywhere in meanest, dirtiest holes and delicious air-conditioned deluxes rarely. The cheap food—15 cents a huge vegetarian meal—I’ve lived on for weeks at a time, is boring but sufficient and not poisonous as everyone told me. Hardly been diarrhetic here even as much as Paris and I’ve really eaten the worst. Maybe I’m immune, immunized by Peru, Mexico, Tangier. But ritzy restaurants are cheaper than Tangier even. Bombay has great food all over. I’ve even drunk water practically all over and not been bugged. And everybody tells me it was instant death. So, what I mean, the inconveniences and terrors of India are a lot of silly gossip by old ladies. Come here and have a ball in the greatest, weirdest nation of history. The structure at Ellora, the missing noses, Moslems knocked off all the noses in this part of the earth, is greater than anything in Greece. Mt. Kailash, Temple Allora, cyclopean bas-relief of six-armed, five-headed, wild haired sex goddesses, demons shaking mountains where the gods are playing dice, Shiva dancing the cosmic dances to create universe, huge mythological great world, elephant-headed god, Ganesha, my favorite, he rides on a rat and is household divinity, every morning pious Hindus give him cornflakes. So, we’ve seen the Dalai Lama, Sanchi stone girls and Ajanta caves and all that and clumb 9,000 feet up Himalayans and seen Maharaja palaces at Jaipur and vast mosques in Delhi and ruined cities and minarets in Aurangabad and met swamis and seen fakirs covered with dust in marketplaces. And talked to gentle, intelligent hermits in caves and watched a parade of naked saddhus, ash-smeared holy men, come down to bathe in Ganges where it emerges from Himalayas and talked to yogis who are all over. And we’ve moved around now for two and half months—two days here, three days there, comfortable traveling and now in Bombay, seeing Snyder off to Japan, sailing tomorrow.

India also great for tourist travel, as nowhere else. Left behind by British, a series of rest houses everywhere. Huge comfortable rooms with all wood furniture, costs 40 cents a night or less to stay in. Can stop over several nights almost wherever you go or else stay in 20 cent hotels attached to railroad stations everywhere for convenience of travelers. Huge rooms with enormous shower bathrooms and ceiling fans and armchairs, spotlessly clean—usually—all these places specially reserved for tourists like us and folks. Or, you can settle down in civilized downtown Bombay or Delhi in big rooms for $20 a month, and write hymns to Kali, in fall and winter and spring quite civilized up to now —it’s April. If the heat and rains come on, just retire to hill stations in mountains. Also almost everybody talks English. And whole world of new literature. Mahabarata and Ramayana equal Homer but are more magical. I’m all involved in huge kiccuppy readings of Indian classics. On top of that Madame Hope Savage⁴⁵ is on the scene. Ah, yes, I forgot. All the signs point to your having a fine time in the Orient, Gregory Corso. Come and get your kicks in India. And as for drugs, my dear, eek, shit, you can score for morphine in ampules, neat and hygienic, in almost any drugstore in Delhi. Plenty black O around. I haven’t tried the pot here, but it’s all over for asking. And best of all, opium dens for real. I finally went to one in Delhi with Peter. Imagine the beautiful drama, back alleys up a ladder to a narrow attic, laying on our hip with our head on a brick while the dealer cooked and prepared a classic old smeary black pipe for us which we inhaled six times about each, and began to feel high in about ten minutes. But six hours later, in hotel room, it was beginning to reach its height. It grows on you, and smoking O is different from eating it or shooting H, and three times better than both combined. Peter, the H fiend agrees emphatically. A new world, a new dimension of junk, better and smoother and sweeter and dreamier and more relaxed and subtler and stronger than mainline H. Yessir, it’s a new kick I never experienced and I thank the kindly gods who reserved that charming surprise for my middle age. Only had the opportunity once so far though. Maybe this week we find a den in Bombay. Fortunately, Peter been mostly well-balanced with all the opportunities around and we been sparing of use and moderate in all indulgences. So the hop is a pleasant diversion and not an omnipresent monster. It’s really bad for you to get involved that way, excessively, as you know. Simply takes too much of your world up and ends crappily.

Hope [Savage], I left note for her in Delhi. She appeared, talking hypnotically, as ever breathless and nervous. We treated her nice and took her to eat Chinese. Then she showed up here in Bombay and we took her to poesy reading we gave. She wandered around anonymous, full of spy plots, indifferent, she says, to anyone she knows two years ago. Regularly cuts herself off from acquaintances every so often, but seemed almost wanly eager to be courteous with us the few times we’ve met. She admires Gary, but independent, and made a lot of lonely great scenes. Winters in Himalayan Kulu Valley, alone in cabin in village with fire, she speaks a little Hindi. No message for you except hopes you are well, she’s not quite human but very hyper-bright, in good health. Probably see her in a few days. She disappears. Can reach her c/o American Express Bombay, and she also gets mail c/o same Delhi. Going to Calcutta in a few weeks to renew passport. She has bureaucratic troubles always, attracts insane consular officials to persecute her occasionally. From Aden to Kashmir she wears shawl and boots—she’s same. So there’s your Hope, still savage. [ ... ]

 

 

[Once they found an apartment in Calcutta, Ginsberg took a trip into the mountains and lost his passport. Orlovsky stayed behind in Calcutta awaiting news about his Veteran’s Administration disability benefits, which had been discontinued. Even though they were drifting apart again, Allen wrote each day to Peter.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Darjeeling, India] to Peter Orlovsky [Calcutta, India] June 6, 1962

 

Dear Peter:

 

Just got back from Kalimpong today and found your 2 letters (June I and June 5)—always thrilled to carry it down the street and sit down and read—makes me feel old time romantic to you. No letter from consulate or U.S.I.S. but that is OK since I did get Sikkim permit (for only 3 days) and will go the day after tomorrow (Friday) (June 8)—stay till the 10th or 11th and then be back in Calcutta several days later. Calcutta and your room and guitar wang sound great and things here also very lovely. I went and visited head of the whole (Zen type) N’ying ma pa sect (red hat tantric) and asked for wang⁴⁶ and talked to him an hour about visions and he said he had asthma and had to prepare a week or 2 in advance praying and building up powers—so said he couldn’t but would definitely if I could come back in September. Well it’s a long journey. I been reading many Tibet books and getting better picture and figuring out what goes on: you get this wang, plus a mantra (short verbal formula) and a text to follow, and meditate like on LSD conjuring up image like on tankas and then eating it up like Ganesh ate the bad giant. So apparently it’s a long process like Zen. Except the initial wang is supposed to be a real splash. Who knows? He the lama said of the vomiter and other visions: “Watch them and let them go, don’t get hung on visions beautiful or ugly, even the wheels within wheels: the point is that all are conjurations of the mind, and so, unreal and to be enjoyed and not grasped at.” The thing I always did with LSD, ayahuasca, was get hung up thinking the visions were real in the sense of realer than everyday —but neither are “real” says the Tibetans.

Also made good friends with head Lama of a yellow hat monastery and taught him some English and he told me about his gods and invited me to stay in Lamasary and said if I want he’d get me a Tibetan boy—apparently lots of boy love in the yellow hat (official sect) monastery. It’s supposed to be a real little sin, don’t count much. Said next time to bring you also. This is 34 yr old English speaking lama-scholar who’s head of the big monastery in Kalimpsong. So I heard all the gossip about all the sects (he said, forget what Dalai Lama’s interpreter said, we should have got wang from Dalai Lama’s guru—teacher in Dharamshala and he’d write them a letter if we ever went back there)—(See all these sects gossiping against the other sects it’s a big comedy.) Also met English monk I mentioned and the Lama told me he likes boys too, one of the big meditation exercises is to imagine fucking the red goddess you have on your tanka.

So I was frustrated and sat down on the edge of a cliff overlooking huge mountain abyss and began demanding my consciousness open and sure enough I began hearing the locusts sound like electric cosmic serpents for a few minutes like on yage. So felt good—the night before on 37th birthday I had dream of seeing the earth like Harry Smith—from afar in space—but exactly one/half earth like this and couldn’t figure it out. Later realized 37 is half of 74 and if I live to be 74 I’ll see the year 2000 I always wanted to.

I stupidly bought a tanka for 200 rupees. I regretted after since I rather keep the money and may run short. But anyway it’s a nice tanka (except it was torn and repaired) like a 4 or 500 [rupee] tanka. Couple lamas at opposite corners watching 3 blue devils appear in flames in air, and some walls in back—and 2 devils are surrounded by yellow, green, red and blue flying witch women each. Painting is not too fine, but not too crude. I’ve also collected about 5 yab-yum statues, plus finally got a copy of those little printed tankas. [ ... ]

Your red goddess with skull cup is a Dakini, and her skull cup means you got to die and get yr skull brains et up to be her lover. She’s supposed to be Wisdom. I saw nice one of her here.

Love

 

Allen

Xxxx

 

 

 

[After Corso insulted Ferlinghetti’s poetry, Lawrence wrote to Ginsberg. Corso had told him that Ginsberg didn’t like his poetry or take him seriously as a poet. Allen quickly set the record straight with this letter. Ferlinghetti was sensitive about being pigeon-holed solely as a publisher and amiable business man after Kerouac described him as such in his books. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Calcutta, India] to Lawrence Ferlinghetti [San Francisco, CA] July 5, 1962

 

Dear Larry:

 

Our letters must have crossed in the mails. I got your July I sad letter today, and had written you one on July 27 [sic: June 26] or something, so you can see even without your saying anything I did hold your hands and look in your eyes soulfully and said I liked D. H. Lawrence poem [The Man Who Rode Away] and told you about Jyoti Datta Bengali poet who also said how nice he liked your poetry and said you should send him your books. I don’t consider you a business man honey (I’m full of chandul—opium—we just got back from the Chinese Den here). Larry I do “consider” you a poet and I do and always have I admit complained about your loose pen but I wouldn’t complain to you about it if I didn’t think you were fine enough to complain to and your poetry solid enough to complain about non-solid frills in it. Don’t feel so bad! Remember, Gregory is a narcissistic put-down artist and he doth exaggerate his put-downs —i.e. for instance he was putting down Peter and telling him he was no poet and should stop writing poetry forever and accept position as my prat-boy and weak sister friend. And that sure bugged Peter because Gregory was drunk and absolutely serious at the time. Actually however Gregory changed his mind as usual a few weeks later. He (Gregory) just claims the right to put people down occasionally to preserve his own independence and let off some steamy insight in usually exasperating and momentarily unfair manner. He do it to Jack too, and Burroughs and (rarely) me (because I got him by the balls in some other way, like hold his head and dry his tears when he gets hysterical like when we all arrived on Tangier dock last year and his passport had expired and they wouldn’t let him off the boat for 48 hours.) So that’s Gregory, neither take him seriously nor don’t take him seriously.

Not seen Jack’s Big Sur—is it out??? But remember he puts almost everyone down in kind of crude subtle way, including me and Peter. I mean, the pictures he paints of me in Town and City, Subterraneans, Dharma Bums, etc. is actually sort of a creepy image and sometimes I got quite bugged, except I figure (by insight and hindsight too) that there’s a basic sympathetic intention underneath and some real insight (“Ginsberg, you’re nothing but a hairy loss,” he said to me 3 years ago looking up from my kitchen floor drunk)—so God knows what kind of good time Charlie lost Denny Dimwit he saw you as—but it isn’t, like, a sophisticated coterie type exclusion hatchet—it’s strictly Jack’s own genius—grotesquerie, home made in his mama’s attic. Probably it’s actually funny.

Jack seems to save his full range of understanding sympathy for the few heroic hero-worship loves he has. That is, the only people he pictures in full 3-D as human round heroes are I think Neal, Burroughs occasionally, his father and mother, (himself less directly)—Gary almost—one or two Huncke others—the subsidiary characters he generally treats with rough impressionist sketches, almost caricatures—including myself and others close to him. You too I guess. It bugged me at first but after all it’s only a novel and, alright, his main energy and reality goes to his obsessive hero, he hardly has one now? I am always so amazed and gratified he has the power and energy to be recording angel of so much detail of the last 2 decades’ seasons,—more work and drive and inspiration than I have summed up in my couple books of poems—that I don’t feel right to be mad at him he hasn’t seen me thru my eyes, or you thru yours, or make completer pictures of everybody. He done what he could do—with all his own needs and inner crazy—and that, when I read his books (the sum of them) seems so much, that the faults seem inevitable. I mean at times I was bugged, he didn’t treat me right. Tho some characters do catch him eternally, like Huncke. Anyway I just mean, don’t be bugged, there is no lasting ill here.

Starting from San Francisco either you never mentioned or I never noticed. I didn’t know you have a new book poems, please send us and we’ll send you big letters of criticisms—send airmail and here’s one dollar for postage. I don’t want you should stop writing or shut up poesy and neither does Peter. I think maybe it’s the too closed-in local literary atmosphere that’s putting you down so low in soul. It bugged me in S.F. last time, it’s a local malady and not too serious tho, it’s like a cold, persistent and unobtrusive. Whether Rexroth is being sympathetic or obtuse, whether Duncan etc. or letters from afar are being understanding or shitty. So don’t feel bad—well anyway, you know all that. I should have written you more seriously line by line about your poems (as I almost did D. H. Lawrence) but it seemed to me your intention was to be hazy-sloppy (as in Fidel Castro poem [One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro]) and so no point detailing what you know already, since you did not mean for each line to be perfect poesy, or try to be at least.

What occurs to me is that you’re more perfect as poet when you’re nearer the bone pessimistic, than when you are being wiggy and hopeful and social-anarchist-revolutionary-lyrical-optimistic. So maybe you should write now some strictly private and anti-social melancholy poems. Anyway that always struck me as your natural vein, that and a kind of empathy-nakedness which is rare.

The solidest element I always thought was apt precise images like the classical butterfly in and out of open boxcar door or the naked objects at the end of the Lawrence poem—rather than puns or ironic references to Dulles. And that the pattern of the lines should be arranging themselves into intuitive shapes, as end of D. H. Lawrence poem.

Well anyway, this is all opium—diarrhea. Glad you got the statues. You want more? They’re only 3 or 4 dollars each and another 2 bucks to ship. For 20 or 40 dollars I could get you some big snazzy Kalis or Yab-Yums.

I’ll work on Aether and send it in a week. Yes, Bunch of Poems, Hiccup, all too flat.⁴⁷ I don’t dig Alba either, because one little stinky poem is Alba the whole book isn’t. It’s actually a decade of poems. I’ll come up with something yet. I wish it was Red Cats, like that. [...]

I realize I’m getting sizeable extra royalties from you, but I thought we were sharing profits 50-50. Is all of your share of my books proceeds going to pay expenses? If so that is obviously not proper and you should readjust royalty rates so that we share the net not gross profits equal, which means it’s ok by me if you cut my royalty scale down. Despite all previous discussions I had not got it thru my skull that you or City Lites Inc. were making no direct proceeds from my books. That should be readjusted! Take it up at the next Board Meeting and rearrange things as seems fit and fair and businesslike. There is, after all, aside from fairness, no long range future with me in your firm if the firm is not making some profit thereby, otherwise I just wind up in 5 years a draggy sea-anchor and dead weight of unremunerative responsibility. I’d rather be one of the (at least modest) moneymakers and have my position assured by more than sentiment. That’s that. But aside from that, since I turned down Knopf and Penguin offers, you can’t entertain the thought that I (and Peter) think of you as $ pimping poesy! Banish the thought, Chairman of the Board, and full speed ahead! S.F. must really be bugging you. Or is it babyshit all over your living room floor? What’s baby doing? Is it any good?

Meanwhile (contradictory as it may seem)—as I said in last letter, if there may be any money practically speaking due me for last half year, send it this way. Don’t send me any theoretical advance, and if you have no midyear inventory any more, just what McBride guesses is already sold, not to be futurely sold. Reason is we’re about broke. I have a couple ways of getting other loot saved for emergency, so don’t send me what is not, practically speaking already due.

Well this is all too much handwriting—I hope you’re feeling better. I’m still on the hop, that’s why I ramble on so. [...]

Enough, enough, goodnight, love always

Allen

 

 

 

[Kerouac was still Ginsberg’s most important correspondent. Allen continued to write long, descriptive letters to Jack. He often said he wrote especially for Kerouac’s ear and in the correspondence he treated Jack as his sounding board on almost every topic.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Calcutta, India] to Jack Kerouac [n.p.] September 9, 1962

 

Dear Jack Ti Jean:

 

Happy happy you answered. To be or not to be? I say to be, whatever we can make of it, I been laying in death arms all last year, now suddenly feel better. Ferlinghetti sent me proofs of new book (Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60, includes Green Auto, Xbalba, Over Kansas, Sather Gate, Aether and lots short tasty scribbles—no big pronouncements, just a wind up book of uncollected poems so I get done with them—and from now on go on)—big future epic plans, first “a poem including history,” all my rantings about politics and newspapers I’m going to put it all together I got pages and pages of that, except now I don’t feel doomy so it’s a big peaceful no hate manifestor—I’m rambling, also big open sex autobiog poem, and also one long poem describing each major “vision” I’ve had in chronologic order, as best I can, including all major drug insights etc., beginning with Blake. Also in 2 weeks the monsoons be over and weather nice, I go travel seek sex temples and then settle down in Benares and type up ayahuasca Peru notebooks for Auerhahn, get that off my back I promised them 2 years ago and been too depressed and poetry-hating to do.

I got to write you another long letter, now I’m opiated tonite and too scattered to, just to answer—re mushrooms, I don’t know what to think, no Leary is a nice man my heart tells me that, he may be overenthusiastic. Yes they make identity meaningless as you said in previous letter—but after all that’s a good thing at times and a religious thing (no ego, etc.) so in long run the experience has something interesting to contribute, no? Needn’t plunge into any abysses immediately, we got time, Man, the race got time to amplify and learn how to use and live with these new feels, after all it’s an interplanetary future and everything’s going to be alright. No hate to Leary and not even suspision suspicion—can’t even spell the word right—don’t want to see anybody go be sent to doom or hell, that’s not the way things should work out. As I said I get cosmic paranoia on mushrooms so I don’t take now, tho I got a stock with me for later feels, but my mistake before was to hang too much urgency and crisis on it instead of whatever relax and dream.

John Foster Dulles you’re right I got mad at him and Ike, truly they will go to heaven—assuming when you die everything just disappears in Nice Quiet—which I assume—Dulles is in Heaven—with Stalin and my momma—it’s all free—but you got to remember to include all sides of the parties and folks in scheme. No more hate, name callings etc. At the same time if we’re going to live together—I mean U.S. and Russia—and China—if we not going to blow up the world—and we’re not—that means we got to make up our mind to really live together and the communists stop hating us—and that’s as you see already beginning on the Russian side with Yevtushenko poet meeting dear old [Robert] Frost—and means the Communists got to relax and gentle up, and the U.S. really got to relax and get gentle to them—and no more paranoias—and that also means everybody really got to change,—that means our foreign policy got to change from brink of war containment, etc. We got to realize that the Russians have as good or almost as good a case against “capitalist warmongers” as we got against communist slave state aggression. Both sides are right and wrong. If this too vague, I been studying the papers U.S., English, Indian, Greek, Russian mags, South American, etc.—I can give you a sloppy but serviceable outline Berlin Vietnam Korea Formosa Hungary etc. etc. Cuba is clear —how both sides have justified serious complaints—isn’t that true?—and I think that Dulles and Eisenhower were too much hung up on the black and white war scene, I’m right, you’re wrong, to be able to resolve the situation peacefully, just made things worse at the time. The whole world has been in a really nerve wracked state the last 15 years-I think it’s only just beginning to clear up—but it is.

Bertrand Russell makes sense, more than anyone, on straightforward What To Do. Last couple days, I think he makes it. All he saying is, use your head, compromise and don’t commit suicide everybody.

Trouble with LeRoi [Jones] and youngers is they see no way out and see clearly the injustices America has pulled but don’t think the U.S. will make it up in time. So he’s got hate and is trying to push thru emotionally that way, mad at cops etc.

But the situation is serious enough for everybody should sit down and think and not scream pro or anti any more but try solve the problem. Russell is at least trying. I think Kennedy and Khrushchev are at least trying to try also. Frost thinks so too, I see by the papers.

All that John Birch scene is really in wrong direction and just emotional and making the problem worse. Incidentally some girl 16 in Chicago wrote me she visited local Nazi Party (Rockwell) HQ over a bookstore there and they are talking about killing me. (I wrote them nice air letter inquiring what they were thinking about and do they really want to kill me? I’m only me and asking them send me their literature and application form maybe I join them.)

And all the left wing hate is also no help, and it isn’t enough for your heart to break because everybody’s heart is broken now.

Gregory says title of his new book is Long Live Man. How lovely of him. He says TO BE.

Assembling huge Aether Notes poem I kept trying to find out what it was all about, all that pain of so many different universes and realization each depends on the brain consciousness. What I came out with, finally, was that the ether high and dissociation of eye ear touch taste smell and final disappearance experience of the blackout was like a little death. So meanwhile we are in this form, not the other, yet, so we got to work with this form, what we got. If we can improve it thru brain changes fine, but meanwhile best to live with what we’re born with and stop suiciding it prematurely. The death will come in its time. Meanwhile the Big World Problem, really is, the whole race of man doesn’t know whether it wants to continue or not, to be or not to be, and that’s why everybody is so Hamlet-helpless in front of cold war crisis. Well the answer is like in the koan, of the man hanging on by his teeth. They asked him what’s the meaning of life and he, there was, no answer, he just hang on to branch with his teeth that’s what he was doing. So I think Russell Bertrand is making the right scene, as far as practical politics concerned. And wish him well. See his point is he does want the race to continue—in whatever universe we be, as of now. Really there is a lot of death wish in everybody’s heart, my heart your heart—it’s been dogging me the last year especially—probably in everybody the same trouble, well I’m making a move. Not shit or get off the pot exactly, but anyway, time to lay the immediate world-hate bane, no?

I won’t burden you with long explanations of how and where the U.S. is in the wrong and where Russia is in the wrong. You need them? But it do mean America is no more and Russia is no more and the whole world is more, and that’s OK. I think wandering around outside U.S. does enlarge perspective. Because, really, why should it be that only the U.S. be right and saved? Do we want to damn the rest of the folks to limbo? But most U.S. thinking is in that way ego-centric. And Russian and Chinese I suppose, it’s all got to go.

Anyway I think what’s happening, Russia is changed enough, softened enough now, to begin to make hope possible, and like that, the U.S. got to change too. The Birch and Conservative scene is just last gasp abreaction to the insight that’s coming thru. So I’m saying I think you too shouldn’t be so rigid about politics, not rigid exactly, just all your poetry politics so isolationist—can’t anymore, the world networks are now all interconnected, the U.S. got itself involved and so we should make a good show of it and get on with the epic. It’ll all be alright.

I’m rambling on too much too vaguely, that’s not what I started to write you about, I said above you’re rigid, well I been rigid too hating Dulles, rigid isn’t the word, just what, paranoia emotionalizing, conspiracies, etc. World too scared and sick for Hitlerian Wagnerian ego pronouncements on any side. Anyway, I say, yes, To Be, let’s go on living till we die. Maybe if everybody decide that, some of the pressure relax. This O makes me ramble, STOP. [ ... ]

I not received your Big Sur book, who published it? I’ll write them myself and ask. Dying to see what you been think-writing and what pages you got holy. Time we all got together and felt good again.

I will actually write you a long letter soon as I clear off my desk—not answering mail the last month, OH-YES-I just did finally fix up a great paean of love I wrote in 1957 [The Names], I think I once showed you, about Huncke, Cannastra, Joan, Morphy and Joe Army (completely disguised) and ending with Neal—7 pages—probably can’t publish it—have to show it to Lucien for his opinion—but even so the sheer pleasure of concentrating all the emotion gave me a whole new lease on life, writing. I revised it cutting out all participles and crap and discovered a little method for super-imposing one image on another:

“His dream, a mouthful of white prick trembling in his head” makes

“His dream mouthful of white prick etc.”

Something I hadn’t noticed so clearly before, makes lines sound Kerouacky-Shakespearean. I think I don’t generally write well enough for first statement always to make it. With this poem I did explode and write great (but repetitive and loose) first draft in 1957—then, now 5 years later, able to cut thru it with knife and superimpose all the scattered parts of one glimpse together. I try that with all the political material I got accumulated, when I get to Benares. Gregory does that a lot, that combining, par excellence.

I getting bored with the flatness of my writing and this seemed to interest me (all these you see and forgive excuses for revising I guess) at least I spent last 2 weeks happy at desk again after a year of aversion.

Re: Cut ups—Bill. Well, he does have a great technique worked out there, I think—surely—I read Soft Machine, a year and half ago in Paris—have you received that from Olympia yet??—and it is especially exquisite, page after page of heroic sinister prose poetry—that is to say, it worked and made an Art Gem. He’s doing other things now. The pure cut up random phase is over and —I think it altered his EAR and mental eye for imagery, so that he writes naturally now like cut up, without mechanical razor recourse, once he trained himself to hear the music, by practice.

Incidentally, you hear about this great Edinburgh Writers Conference? Mad scene—Miller, Durrell, Mary McCarthys and Angus Wilsons and Trocchi and Mailer etc. and Burroughs officially invited and he made a great dignified scene, W S. Exterminator. I read all about it in English papers in British Council reading room. They had The Scotsman by chance, an Edinburgh newspaper, which gave huge local coverage. So Bill gave two great speeches, one on censorship, but full of his own weird strange ideas. Then next day “The Future of the Novel” and everybody saying well we’re trying but the novel is a dead form, etc. old sociological and moral bullshits and then Burroughs’ turn he gets up looking like an impersonal royal physician and delivers technique-logical scientific demonstration lecture on his experiments with cut ups and new thing “fold ins” reading them prose the like of which beautiful you can imagine—all of them attending serious and slightly shook up—Kushwant Singh in turban asks “Are you serious?” thinking to get a humanistic laugh and Burroughs looks him in eye with St. Louis undersea face of genius—“Of course I am.” He do know what he’s doing, for him. Anyway it made a big impression and McCarthy and Mailer had been praising him in big speeches days before so when he came on with his own mind people were listening and apparently heard. Lovely to see Burroughs in the World, time he made great high scene like that. Anyway got me all excited reading the papers so far away. Not in contact with him the last few months. Stories mentioned a new—two new—novels he’s writing—Nova Express (I think it’s finished) and The Ticket That Exploded. Fucking great Flower.

All right, everything fine in world, you alright too, cheer up old patriot, the country don’t need be defended, the WORLD needs us to defend it, that’s what. We all going to be saved and die happy! I mean leave a harmonious dream behind not another old nightmare. Les Preludes (List) heroicking trumpets in my head all day. Thou’rt the Guard!

Love,

 

Allen

and forgive me everything else and we’ll think together.

 

 

[While in India, Ginsberg wrote to Nobel Prize laureate Bertrand Russell about the arms race. He received a reply in which Russell stated that world-wide nuclear annihilation was a near certainty. That comment unnerved Allen since he respected Russell’s opinion, so he wrote back for clarification. Since both Ginsberg and Russell had studied William Blake and had even experienced visions of Blake, there were several references to Blake’s work. Even as Ginsberg wrote this letter, the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding in the waters off the coast of Cuba.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Calcutta, India] to Bertrand Russell [England] October 4, 1962

 

Dear Earl Russell:

 

I wept to receive your letter, while walking back to room on Calcutta street.

What does Blake do? My experience is 1948, alone on couch in NY had masturbated, then reading The Sunflower suddenly heard ancient tender voice speak aloud, “Ah Sunflower weary of time” (Blake sounded like the Ancient of Days)—bliss answered yearning—felt “Eternity”—out window building corners, images of sentience everywhere. Then “The Sick Rose” poem, auditory presence again and sensational consciousness / limitless behind Death—body physical lightness also. Continued with “Little Girl Lost” (How can Lyca Sleep / if her parents weep / if her Hart does ache / then let Lyca wake)—Kafkian madness doom event, my deepest sense data experiences age 22. Same flashes continued a week, catalyzed by Blake poems, I anticipating them, even precipitated epiphanies by yelling alone in room. Finally days later isolated walking on Columbia Univ. path, same sensation crept over me, but without Fatherly voice—suddenly a new feeling of cosmic cancer (universe will eat me alive)—scared me and ended recurrence of these sensations.