Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online

d’idiocie is understandable. True, I did feel remorse . . . So much so as to cancel an appointment with Burroughs for the next day, which probably bored him altogether. He has no patience for my kind of neurosis, I know . . . But since then I’ve been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge. You understand, I’m sure. Remember that the earlier part of my life has always been spent in an atmosphere vigorously and directly opposed to this sort of atmosphere. It automatically repels me, thereby causing a great deal of remorse, and disgust. There is a kind of dreary monotony about these characters, an American sameness about them that never varies and is always dull . . . Like a professional group, almost. The way they fore-gather at bars and try to achieve some sort of vague synthesis between respectability and illicitness . . . That is annoying, but not half so much as their silly gossiping and snickering. If they were but Greeks, things would take on a different tone altogether. I am repelled, then, largely by these social aspects, an overdose of which I got that night. As to the physical aspects, which as you know, disgust me consciously, I cannot be too sure . . . whatever’s in my subconscious is there. I am not going to play the fool about that. My whole waking nature tells me that this sort of thing is not in my line. It keeps on telling me. It drums in my nature, telling me, until I begin to suspect its motive. But I shan’t worry my pretty little head about it anymore. I think that in the end it will just be a matter of “Drive on!”—you have heard that story about Phil the junky, haven’t you? I shall let my neurosis dissolve in the white fire of action, as it were. Strangely, the thing that annoys me the most is the illusion everyone has that I’m torn in two by all this . . . when actually, all I want is clear air in which to breathe, and there is none because everybody’s full of hot air. The remorse you detected in my last letter is not all for the reasons you imagined . . . Once I was in bed with a girl, down in Baltimore; I had picked her up in a bar and she promised me she would come across. When we got to bed, she fell asleep and couldn’t be awakened . . . I spent the whole night wrestling around with her limp rag of a body, as she snored. It is a horrible experience, that . . . You feel remorse the next day, ashamed of your desire; perhaps you feel like a necrophiliac, maybe there’s a fear of necrophilia in all of us, and this business of wrestling around with an unconscious woman is the closest thing there is to necrophilia . . . Well, that’s the kind of remorse I felt, for exactly the same reasons. But I knew there would be no clear air vouchsafed me the next day . . . There was no one I could tell the story to who wouldn’t in return blow a lot of hot air my way . . . It’s almost as though my neurosis were not ingrown, but that it was the result of the air, the atmosphere around me. For there are a lot of horrible things I’ve done in my life, in the dark away from everything, and not only to me. I am not a Puritan, I don’t answer to myself; rather, I’m a son of Jehovah—I advance with trepidation towards the scowling elders, who seem to know about every one of my transgressions, and are going to punish me one way or the other. As a little boy, you know, I started a very serious forest fire in Massachusetts . . . and it’s never worried me in the least, because I’ve had only my own blithe self to answer to for that crime . . . If on the other hand, I’d been caught, I would have suffered terribly. This then, is the kind of remorse I felt . . . But that too is now purged . . . I trust.
    You shouldn’t have been “distressed” by the tone of my last letter. It was only a mood . . . and a not malevolent one either, not at all. It was all done as an older brother. Sometimes you