Writes of passage
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/07/18/writes_of_passage/
In letters, Beat giants bolster each other and incubate ideas
By Jay Atkinson
July 18, 2010
In his later years, poet-provocateur Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997
at age 70, had a reputation for being fussy and demanding, a
privileged icon of the Far Left, of the intelligentsia, of the Beat
Generation the man who wrote "Howl'' and "Kaddish,'' tried to
levitate the Pentagon, jammed with Bob Dylan, and meditated with the
Maharishi.
Prior to becoming an eminence grise with a bad attitude, however, the
young Ginsberg was friend and de facto literary agent to his fellow
Beats, namely Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, and
Gregory Corso. He was smart and funny and Jewish and "queer,'' when
only half of those qualities were fashionable. But Ginsberg, like his
hero Walt Whitman, contained multitudes, and a lively new book of
letters between him and Kerouac is teeming with the schemes, quirks,
and contradictions of these indelible literary characters.
Kerouac and Ginsberg met in the early 1940s, when both were attending
Columbia University. Kerouac, a football player from Lowell, and
Ginsberg, then an earnest student being mentored by the critic Lionel
Trilling, were an unlikely pair. In one of Ginsberg's first letters
to Kerouac in July 1945, he wrote, "[Y]ou are an American more
completely than I, more fully a child of nature.'' Over the next two
decades, in person and within their voluminous correspondence, these
differences would be sorted out, many times over. As Kerouac wrote
back that summer, "You were right about my 'peckerhead romanticism.'
Of course. I perfectly agree with you. . . . We can begin worrying
our little heads about something else now.''
What these groundbreaking artists were most preoccupied with was
getting published and becoming famous. In their salad days, Ginsberg
was an energetic and likeable tout, hustling his and his friend's
poems and scraps of prose like they were cheap watches, while Kerouac
veered between the extremes of shrewd literary tactician and
whimsical savant. (The fact that they each moved around a lot between
the mid '40s and early '60s is a boon to this collection, and to our
understanding of American literature.) Whether Paris or Paterson,
N.J., Ginsberg typically remained too long in one place for his
nomadic temperament, while Kerouac, who in one letter says, "I just
wanta stay home and write and figure things out by myself,''
inevitably left too soon. Ginsberg's occasional paranoia and habit of
making outrageous statements got him into trouble fairly often,
despite Kerouac's frequent warnings: "[D]on't let them maneuver you
into getting too hung up on slogans however good.''
The 182 letters here, many of them quite long, present a marathon
conversation between two writers that was an incubator for their
creative ideas. Often broke and practically homeless, they swapped
microloans, tips on available crash pads, and news of their triumphs
and tribulations. In June 1949 Ginsberg was committed to a
psychiatric hospital, describing the attendant shrinks as "the
bloodless apoetic bourgeoisie, the social scientists and rat
experimenters, the blue eyes who went to the proms.'' In a letter, he
tells Kerouac to "[s]ay what you want, but don't write me tracts
suggesting that I dynamite the establishment for instance. I mean,
they may take offense.''
The fundamental difference between the two writers, made clear in
these letters, was that Ginsberg, chronically unsure of himself, was
trying to forge an identity through his poetry. On the other hand,
Kerouac knew instinctively who he was and became determined to
publish his "true-story novels,'' what he called the Duluoz Legend,
come hell or high water. Well into adulthood, Ginsberg was still
looking for approval from his old Columbia mentors, and established
poets like William Carlos Williams. But Kerouac had already moved
past the literary notions of the previous generation and was waiting
for his friend to catch up. "Take this advice from a man who has
created a masterpiece,'' wrote Kerouac after finishing his novel "On
the Road.'' "Just type up your poems.''
The biggest problem with this collection, despite its resonance, is
that the Song of the Beat Generation was not a duet, but improvised
jazz of different styles, sounds, and voices. Lurking throughout is
the Adonis of Denver, Neal Cassady, lover to Ginsberg, Kerouac's
muse, and the much-celebrated con man, ladies' man, male hustler, and
thief. Beyond the obvious omission of letters from Cassady, gaps in
this epistolary soundtrack cry out for solos from Gary Snyder, John
Clellon Holmes, Corso, Burroughs, and others. Additionally, the
editorial notes are brief and sparse, when a clearer sense of context
and background would have improved the book.
In May 1959, Kerouac, depressed by the noisy acclaim over "On the
Road,'' wrote to Ginsberg, "Besides, soon we'll part, later grow old,
die, you won't even be at my funeral.'' Their friendship waned over
the next 10 years, when Kerouac retreated further into isolation and
alcoholism, and Ginsberg grooved on, into the Age of Aquarius.
Kerouac died at age 47 in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1969. His body was
brought back to Lowell, and he was buried in Edson Cemetery. Ginsberg
was one of his pallbearers.
--
Jay Atkinson's latest book is "Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac's Lost
Highway and My Search for America.'' Contact him at jaya@bu.edu.
--------
Pen Pals:
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Literary World They Made
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/books/20book.html
By JANET MASLIN
Published: July 19, 2010
In one of Allen Ginsberg's more crazily virtuosic letters to his
sometime soul mate, Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg included an apology of
sorts. "I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about
it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your
pity," he wrote. He also looked back on his life as an artist and
described it witheringly: "Art has been for me, when I did not
deceive myself, a meager compensation for what I desire." And he
acknowledged being worn, enervated and world-weary. "I am sick of
this damned life!" he complained.
The year was 1945. Ginsberg was a precociously ancient 19-year-old.
He would grow friskier, more pragmatic and less self-dramatizing
during the course of his long correspondence with Kerouac, but one
thing never changed: Ginsberg's insistence on keeping the friendship
alive. It lasted until Kerouac disappeared into an alcoholic haze and
died in 1969, despite Ginsberg's best efforts to save him.
Many of the two men's letters went to separate university archives,
Kerouac's to Columbia, and Ginsberg's to the University of Texas. And
there they sat for decades, not without good reason. These letters
can be as long-winded, rambling, visionary and impenetrable as each
man's writing style would suggest. But they can also be sharp, lucid,
funny, tender, intimate, gossipy, jubilant and absolutely honest
about the two aspiring authors' gigantic ambitions.
And if their correspondence sounds one loud cautionary note, it's a
warning to be careful of what you wish for. The free-spirited energy
of their early communications can be seen slowly ossifying into the
discourse of eminences too busy being famous to be friends. As
Kerouac predicted to their mutual friend and mentor, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti: "Someday 'The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack
Kerouac' will make America cry."
In the seductive collection they've called "Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg: The Letters," the editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford
stake out a distinct piece of literary turf. They do this despite the
fact that Kerouac and Ginsberg were expansive letter writers, that
each wrote to many correspondents, and that reams of these other
letters have already shown up elsewhere. A third of the
Kerouac-Ginsberg letters in this bumpy but transfixing volume have
also been published before.
But this book's emphasis is on the intensity and passion of two
writers' long conversation. That such a paper trail exists is never
taken for granted. Amazingly, they wrote expansive, soul-searching
letters even when in close proximity, let alone during the lengthy
periods spent (as one of them put it) on the road. And the arc of the
friendship is fully preserved here, from the hot-air excesses of
college days to the chillier, fame-ravaged exchanges of later years.
Each was an important critic of the other's work. Each read as
voraciously as he wrote. What Ginsberg called "the secret knowledge
of reciprocal depths" helped bind them.
And neither was above noticing how the magazine Mademoiselle chose to
cover the newly famous Beat Generation, once these two and their
friends managed to the everlasting amazement of one and all to
become published, celebrated, imitated and, in some quarters, reviled.
"Hasn't it been awful?" Kerouac would write to Ginsberg in 1959. "We
were so swingy? And now young poets are sneering at us?" Two years
earlier it had been Ginsberg sagely advising Kerouac to be wary of
becoming a symbol for the so-called Beat Generation: "You have too
much else to offer to be tied down to that and have to talk about
that every time someone asks your opinion of weather."
But the Beat aura hangs over this book. Hindsight has made it
impossible to avoid the shared myth that enveloped Kerouac, Ginsberg,
their very close friends Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs, and
the wider circle that included Gregory Corso, Lucien Carr, Peter
Orlovsky, Paul Bowles and Gary Snyder. And Mr. Morgan, one of the
letters' co-editors, is the authoritative Beat bibliographer who has
devoted many years to the archives of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Mr.
Ferlinghetti and many others.
Partly because Mr. Morgan has already mined this vein for other books
including the Ginsberg biography "I Celebrate Myself," the
Ginsberg-Snyder letters and Beat walking literary tour guides to New
York and San Francisco he has written a concise but broad survey of
Beat history. It's called "The Typewriter Is Holy," and it's a
helpful, even necessary, companion piece to the letters, which are
only minimally annotated. It's also a book that tries to put the
far-reaching Beat tentacles and vast Beat cultural legacy into perspective.
Mr. Morgan has said that he finds two different kinds of people
interested in the Beats: either those who know nothing about them or
those who know everything. "The Typewriter Is Holy" deliberately
caters to both types.
For the unknowledgeable, it can be blisteringly obvious, as in:
"Kerouac, a fast typist, decided that he would ignore punctuation,
paragraph breaks and traditional form, and type the story in one long
sustained burst of energy. For this book, he would put the words down
on paper as fast as they came into his head without stopping to
revise." These same readers may be surprised to learn that "On the
Road" was typed on an enormous paper scroll.
For readers who are already familiar with biographies of Beat
personnel, Mr. Morgan just means to help with logistics. Who was in
Tangier when? Or at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco? Or
the Beat Hotel in Paris? Or visiting Neal Cassady? Or avoiding
Cassady, as Kerouac did when his friend wound up in San Quentin on a
drug charge?
Though "The Typewriter Is Holy" is most useful in conjunction with
other books, it does neatly condense Beat lore. And it makes the same
point to which Mr. Morgan has devoted decades' worth of archival
work. Both of these books underscore the very un-Beat concept of Beat
power. One book shows where it came from. The other explains why it's
not going away.
--
JACK KEROUAC AND ALLEN GINSBERG: THE LETTERS
Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford
500 pages. Viking. $35.
THE TYPEWRITER IS HOLY
The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation
By Bill Morgan
291 pages. Free Press. $28.
.
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