Jack and Allen, in their own words

Jack and Allen, in their own words

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-kerouac-ginsberg-20100718,0,6040928.story

An assemblage of about 200 letters between Beat men Ginsberg and
Kerouac offers insight into their friendship, their souls and their writing.

By Robert Faggen
July 18, 2010

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
The Letters
Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford
Viking: 528 pp., $35

"Howl" (1956) and "On the Road" (1957), two works that helped define
a time, sprang from two wildly fired, independent imaginations. Few
would have put Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac together when they met
at Columbia University in 1944. But they became profound friends,
inspired in part by the muse of the elusive, multi-vocal Neal Cassady
and joined by the brilliantly perverse, professorial elder William
Burroughs. Beaten and beatitude ­ beat, the Beats. There has been as
much interest in the style, lives and scenes as there has been in the
thinking and the writing. Ginsberg lived his life increasingly with
dramatic flair, if not self-promotion. Kerouac appeared to drift soon
after the 1950s into drink and solitude. The depth of their
development as friends but especially as writers has never been shown
more clearly than in this stunning new collection, "Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg: The Letters." Consisting of about 200 letters, the
book is large and comes with few notes. The letters are sometimes
long but almost infallibly interesting. Ginsberg biographer Bill
Morgan and David Stanford, a longtime editor at Viking, provide
readers with a volume as illuminating as it is indispensable for
understanding these writers and their work.

Ginsberg and Kerouac divulge here what really seems to matter most ­
their souls and their writing. There is literary gossip about their
compatriots, including, of course, Cassady, Burroughs, Gregory Corso,
Herbert Huncke and others. The letters, though, are more often about
what each thinks about something vital. It's fascinating, for
example, to hear Kerouac talk about what Cassady had to say after
attending a lecture given by Thomas Mann. And if there is a widely
held view that Kerouac became a curmudgeon only later in his life,
readers might be surprised to find him writing in 1949: "I want to
read books, I want to write books, I'll write books in the woods.
Thoreau was right; Jesus was right. It's all wrong and I denounce it
and it can all go to hell. I don't believe in this society but I
believe in man, like Mann. So roll your own bones, I say."

Kerouac was responding, in part, to Ginsberg's struggle with being
committed to a psychiatric institute. Kerouac tends to maintain a
laconic, sad assurance in his letters. Ginsberg's missives on his
shapeshifting self tend to meander and seem a bit more
self-consciously literary. As Ginsberg comes to reject the notion
that he's crazy, Kerouac encourages him as a great young poet. We see
Ginsberg entranced by Blake's visions and by the purity of Bach. And
Ginsberg inspires and confirms Kerouac's yearning for a mythic West
meeting a dharmic East. In reading these letters, you feel both
writers moving each other toward greater energies of transcendence.

Faggen is writing a biography of Ken Kesey and is the Barton Evans
and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.

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