Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg The letters

Jack Kerouac, 1922-1969

Book - 2010

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BIOGRAPHY/Kerouac, Jack
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Subjects
Published
New York, N.Y. : Viking 2010.
Language
English
Main Author
Jack Kerouac, 1922-1969 (-)
Other Authors
Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997 (-), Bill Morgan, 1949-, David Stanford, 1951-
Physical Description
xxvii, 500 p. : facsims. ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes index.
ISBN
9780670021949
Contents unavailable.
Review by Choice Review

This important volume contains a huge selection of the letters Ginsberg and Kerouac exchanged between 1944 and 1963. (Morgan and Stanford assure the reader that letters exchanged after 1963 were relatively brief and uninteresting.) Two-thirds of the letters appearing here have never before been published. Kerouac was a great letter writer; Ginsberg was a very good one. Readers will be entertained and learn a great deal about the Beats and those in their orbit. The correspondence of the Beats is an important part of their legacy, and these letters reveal just how their ideas about spontaneity could yield literary results in the same class as their more orthodox writings. The volume is poorly annotated, but it has an unusually detailed index (23 pages), which helps enormously. Indispensable for those with a commitment to American literature. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. B. Almon University of Alberta

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

"TONIGHT while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are," Jack Kerouac began a typical letter to his friend Allen Ginsberg in 1950. "God's angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old man in a lunch cart, and God - their faces! I wondered what God was up to." God's purpose would remain opaque to Kerouac - try as he might to impart some glimpse of it in his work - and a decade later he was pretty much a burntout case. Poring over his old correspondence with Ginsberg and others in 1961, he sadly wondered at "the enthusiasms of younger men." "Someday 'The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac' will make America cry," he wrote. And well might we be moved to weep, for any number of reasons: for a time when "angelheaded hipsters" (as they delighted in mythologizing themselves) hit the road looking for kicks and Whitmanesque connection with those (generally male) who were likewise "mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved," when mainstream society seemed so dull and doomed (by the Bomb, of course) that a wayward life was all the more fun for being heroic, too. Mostly we weep because we know it ends badly - for all of us, really, but especially poor Kerouac, who became famous and was blamed in part for the beatniks in Washington Square and the hippies to come. "We gotta get out of NY," he wrote Ginsberg in 1959, having warned his friend the year before, "Beware of California." Already the world - a world he helped create - was closing in on him from both sides. But in the beginning Kerouac's only claque consisted of his fellow hipsters - among them William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and especially Ginsberg, who offered himself as an adoring little brother. It becomes clear while reading "Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters" that, to a remarkable degree, each was dependent on the other for encouragement and advice, and it's rather astonishing how well founded their mutual regard proved to be. Even before Ginsberg published his masterpiece, "Howl" (1956), Kerouac had predicted that someday his friend would be a "Jewish National Hero": "Ginsberg will be the name, like Einstein in Science, that the Jews will bring up when they claim pride in Poetry." And lo, it came to pass. Indeed, the only writer for whom Kerouac had greater expectations was himself, and Ginsberg would learn the hard way that it was best to concur in this. "It's late for me to say it but I see how much better you are than I," he wrote Kerouac in 1955, two and a half years after he'd rashly ventured to suggest that a draft of "On the Road" (which Kerouac had likened to "Ulysses") was "crazy" but "salvageable." He never made that mistake again. Kerouac blasted back: "Do you think I don't realize how jealous you are and how you and Holmes and Solomon" - their mutual friends John Clellon Holmes and Carl Solomon - "all would give your right arm to be able to write like the writing in 'On the Road.'" He added that he'd like to punch them all "in the kisser," if not for "too many glasses to take off." Ginsberg was contrite, and rightly so, since nobody would benefit from Kerouac's example more than he. "[It] isn't writing at all - it's typing," Truman Capote remarked, apropos of Kerouac's having composed "On the Road" via a 120-foot-long roll of tracing paper fed continuously through his typewriter. Inspired by the spontaneity of bebop, Kerouac called his method "blowing" or "sketching," and was eager, as ever, to explain the matter to Ginsberg: "You just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words (which effortless angels of the vision fly when you stand in front of reality) . . . and slap it all down shameless, willy-nilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing." As one may surmise from Kerouac's prose style (epistolary and otherwise), a steady ingestion of drugs was also crucial to the process - primarily Benzedrine to keep the flow going, and marijuana (or, this being the '50s, "tea") to keep the angels flying. Ginsberg hipped to that aspect of things, too, and in one letter he describes staring, stoned on peyote, at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, impressed by its "Golgotha-robot" visage. "This peyote vision was the original inspiration for Ginsberg's poem 'Howl,'" the editors, Bill Morgan and David Stanford, gloss in a footnote. "I realize how right you are," Ginsberg enthused of his breakthrough work, "that was the first time I sat down to blow, it came out in your method, sounding like you, an imitation practically." Nor did Kerouac's contribution end there. Not only did he suggest the title (nixing the author's lame "Strophes") of what would become perhaps the most famous American poem of the latter 20th century, but he led the cheering when Ginsberg introduced "Howl" to the public with a frenzied reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on Oct. 7, 1955. BY then Kerouac had discovered Buddhism, and this is where things begin to get thick for the reader of these letters. Two stoned white guys writing almost exclusively about dhyana and the like - and I can think of no better way to describe the long middle section of this book - are generally interesting only to each other. "Neal begins there is no beginning and end to the world, the karmic etheric akasha essence substance vibrating continuously in all the billion universes and our atman-entities rushing around" is a typical passage, the like of which made me wish I had a butler standing behind me exploding paper bags every time I nodded. Given that Kerouac was beginning to drink too much on top of everything else ("because of silly elation, wine and benny, I cannot sit down and practice true dhyana"), there is even more of the blowhard grandiosity, too, with Ginsberg supplying the usual indiscriminate applause, in the absence of which we might have been spared "The Dharma Bums" (1958). Ginsberg, always the more worldly of the two, got a kick out of fame. "What inevitable mad dream of life we've turned up," he wrote Kerouac (once Viking had finally published "On the Road" in 1957), wisely advising his friend, "SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!!!!" Kerouac took this to heart, more or less: he made drunken jazz records with Steve Allen and Norman Granz, and waxed indignant when Sloan Wilson sold his novel "A Summer Place" to the movies for big bucks, whereas Kerouac was getting jerked around by Marlon Brando (who "doesn't answer letter from greatest writer in America," he railed, "and he's only a piddling king's clown of the stage"). In the end, of course, money was slight consolation for a shy, paranoid man who could scarcely leave his house anymore without being accosted by the beatniks he deplored, and never mind riding rails and hitchhiking and "balling the jack" from one coast to another in Neal Cassady's 1949 Hudson. What he himself had named the Beat Generation was, he sensed, drifting away from "Buddha kindness" toward rabble-rousing of the leftist "blood in the street" sort. "I DON'T WANT NOTHIN TO DO WITH POLITICS," he roared at Ginsberg, whose own Communist sympathies (earning him the moniker "Carlo Marx" in "On the Road") were more suspect than ever. "You and I and Burroughs and Gregory . . . believe in God and TELL THEM THAT, YELL IT!" SO it went in those sad final years. The last exchange of letters in the present volume is from 1963; five years later Kerouac would appear on "Firing Line," William F. Buckley Jr.'s television program, bloated and drunk, knocking hippies and explaining the war in Asia as a Vietnamese "plot to get Jeeps into their country." One year later, at the age of 47, he was dead of cirrhosis. Ginsberg, meanwhile, became a beloved and quite benign public figure, paying tribute to his friend's memory by helping to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colo. A place for those who "burn, burn, burn" with literary vocation just might have pleased Kerouac, whose favorite review of "On the Road" concluded with the words "O I wish I was young again." That, more than anything, may have been what it was all about. Blake Bailey is writing a book about Charles Jackson, author of the novel "The Lost Weekend."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

In August 1944, Allen Ginsberg sends a letter to his close friend Jack Kerouac in care of the Bronx County Jail, where he's incarcerated as a material witness in a murder case. So begins a profound 20-year correspondence about books, spiritual quests, sex, love, and the struggle for recognition. Morgan, author of The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (2010), and editor Stanford showcase 200 high-voltage letters, most never before published, that embody the energy and psychic hunger that fueled the creativity of these giants of American literature. Ginsberg and Kerouac frolic and dive in the ocean of language, trading urgent confessions, bracing criticism, and mutual inspiration, using their passionate missives as proving grounds for their radical writing, core beliefs, and personal dilemmas. Here are intense inquiries into art, truth, and Buddhism; wild tales of narcotics, world travels, and their brother Beats, especially William Burroughs and Neal Cassady; and fresh insights into such seminal works as Ginsberg's Howl and Kerouac's On the Road. This incandescent collection deepens our understanding of an essential literary revolution.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

At times loving, at others blistering, sarcastic, often uncomfortably self-lacerating and intimate, these 200 letters, collected in a heroic editorial effort by Ginsberg biographer Morgan and independent editor Stanford, cover the years 1944-1963, the most fertile in the creative lives of Kerouac and Ginsberg. A disbelieving Ginsberg writes to Kerouac in 1952 that On the Road is unpublishable, while Kerouac asks Ginsberg to treat his magnum opus as the next Ulysses. Kerouac immediately praises Howl in 1955, and in return Ginsberg gives Kerouac the manuscript while recounting, like any hopeful author, how freebies have gone to Eliot, Pound, Faulkner. Throughout, the sometimes sporadic letter writing is filled with fragments of works in progress and pungent observations on the authors and publishing people who influenced them, from Dante and Gide to Malcolm Cowley and Sterling Lord. There also is plenty of gossip about Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, and others in the circle. A growing rift concludes the 1950s, as literary fame mixed with alcohol weighs on Kerouac, though these soul brothers reunite through letters of the early 1960s. On receiving Ginsberg's work, Thelonius Monk exclaimed, "It makes sense." In its strange way, so does this intense and offbeat correspondence. (July 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Kerouac and Ginsberg first met on Columbia University's campus in 1943, both tyro authors drawn to each other by a love of literature. This remarkable collection of letters-two-thirds of which are published here for the first time-documents their friendship through 1963, six years before Kerouac's untimely death. Open-hearted and richly detailed, the letters discuss the authors' personal lives and loves, their investigations into Buddhism, their ongoing creative projects, and their struggle to find outlets for their works leading up to the publication of Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956 and Kerouac's On The Road in 1957. Rich in news about fellow Beat writers, including John Clellon Holmes, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso, among others, their correspondence provides a bird's-eye view of what went into the making and marketing of the Beat Generation. VERDICT The publication of these letters between two of America's leading 20th-century authors is an extraordinary event in American literature, particularly welcome in this era of chat and Twitter.-William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

It seems fitting, somehow, that the correspondence of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, literary rebels and scourges of convention, should begin with a prison postmark.The two got to know each other in 1944, and their first letter, Ginsberg to Kerouac, came in mid-August of that year, when Kerouac was cooling his heels in the Bronx County Jail for his small part in a sordid murder. That case is well documented in biographies of both Kerouac and Ginsberg, of which Ann Charters's Kerouac (1994) and Bill Morgan's I Celebrate Myself (2006), respectively, are essential. The letter is hitherto not well known, however, and it reveals no remorse on the part of the 18-year-old Ginsberg, who was also tangled up in the business, and the 22-year-old Kerouac. Instead, Ginsberg wrestles a novice's apercu out of the fact that the victim's apartment had been freshly redecorated: "The snows of yesteryear seem to have been covered by equally white paint." For his part, newly married even while behind bars, Kerouac replies of Carr, "Hating himself as he does, hating his 'human-kindness,' he seeks new vision, a post-human post-intelligence."Whitman meets Nietzsche, with some Keats and Dostoyevsky thrown in for good measure. But both Kerouac and Ginsberg would soon be on to something elseApollo wrestling with Dionysus. Their letters multiplied, hundreds of them now collected in Bill Morgan and David Stanford's new anthology Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, letters that skip over oceans and continentsbut also travel only a hop, from Ozone Park to Sheepshead Bay, say, on the rare occasions when the two were in the same town at the same time.Whatever the provenance or destination, the letters are full of enthusiasms: for books read, for people met, for impulses satisfied or soon to be satisfied. Kerouac is pleased because a child watching him work is "amazed because I type so fast." Ginsberg is pleased because "I Allen Ginsberg one and only, have just finished cutting down my book from 89 poems to a mere perfect 42."But then there are the professional jealousies, the squabbles and the gossip. Kerouac rails because others are being published. "Can you even tell me for instance...why they publish [John Clellon] Holmes's book [Go] which stinks and don't publish mine because it's not as good as some of the other things I've done?" he demands. (This is in 1952, some years before his ship is definitively to come in.) Ginsberg replies, unhelpfully, that he thinks Doctor Sax is better than On the Road, as perhaps it was, given that On the Road was much different from the version we now know.The collection shows two writers on the ascent, hungry, seeking fame and, at times, even the endorsement of the establishment. (Ginsberg sends T.S. Eliot a copy of Howl, seeking a blurb.) It tracks them as they achieve notoriety, then fame, and it hints at fissures that will soon openchronicled, one hopes, in Volume 2, since this group of letters ends in 1963, before the Dionysian moment fully kicks in. (It's there, though. Ginsberg to Kerouac: "Got high on junk last night and thought of you.") Stay tuned as the long, strange trip unfolds.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.