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

you’ve got more of it to spare than I. And now, if you will excuse me for the outburst, allow me to bid you goodnight.
    [ . . . ]
    Jean
    Â 
    Â 
    Allen Ginsberg [n.p., Sheepshead Bay, New York?] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?]
    after September 6, 1945
    Â 
    Dear Jack:
    I got your letter yesterday. I said to Joan [Adams] when I saw her in the W.E. [West End Bar] “Celine [Young] reminds me of Natasha or whatever her name was in the Magic Mountain .” Your remark to the same end in your letter—is this telepathy? Thus surprised me Joan didn’t agree though. I think she’s thinking of the healthy Celine, paramour of the up and coming lawyers (though that somewhat fits in with Mann, even.) As you have been father confessor of late, I have been brother (or sister?) confidante for some years now and I know the feeling; I suspect that there’s some transferred libido in the role.
    As there is also, I suppose, in my and Bill’s sharp curiosity vis à vis your various affaires de folie . The assumption on my part (now half habitual) of your double nature and the conflicts there from—“the illusion that everyone has that I am torn in two by all this,” was formerly a sort of half prurient wish-fulfillment. You have got me there. Still you can not arrive at a verdict yourself—that in a sense you are being persecuted by an atmosphere—so easily as you do by “as it were” dissolving it in the white ice of action. I am repelled by the atmosphere of Larry’s and Main Street, and by [Bill] Gilmore’s patterns of innuendo, at the same time I find myself revolving about in that particular universe (to use a phrase of yours). It is much the same with you; after all, the atmosphere is one that you have chosen from other than aesthetic impulses, you are also drawn by a prurient curiosity which you are conscious of I suppose. You could even accept them (these posy people) as Greeks, though you have contempt and some fear for them as they are. And the “remorse” that you feel is avowedly exteriorized, you are afraid of Burroughs’s inquisitive sardonicism, of external consciousness of your fatal flaws. Burroughs or Gilmore are perhaps trying to drive you to this level, you on the other hand provoke them by manifestations of fear, by trying to maintain yourself on another level from them and ignoring or rationalizing all evidences to the contrary. You are more Greek than Gilmore, and more American than Greek, and so you need not be so tense about it.
    I don’t enjoy sitting at your feet being thrown into consternation by fits of divine madness—alternately “frightened, annoyed, disgusted or pleased.” You are not a toy you know, nor am I a well meaning simpleton ineffectually trying to fathom you. At the same time your conservation of speculative energy and growing aloofness in a promiscuous exhibition of your wares hit me as another corridor in the gamut of emotions, on surprisingly Burroughsian and (I bow) mature in the line of development. Your art is as you say more important to you than anything, mine is an emotional egocentricity. I accept this because I would relegate art to a purely expressive and assertive tool—here I am more Rimbaud, I think. And for me its equal purpose is as a tool for discovery. But the assertion—myself—and the discovery—external—are my aims; I am dedicated to myself. It is you who do not recognize the impossibility of dedicating yourself to your fellow-beings, you are dedicated to your art. My art is dedicated to me.
    Anyway, if we traced the currents of poetry, I think that in the end the whole art making machine (in yourself as in myself) would be egocentric, whether we wish to deceive ourselves with other ideas. And in the end, and with Julian [Lucien Carr]. He does not wish to dedicate himself to another, except as far as for him it will dedicate another to him. Love is