Free Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg by Jack Kerouac Page A

night. I’m very busy staving off the horror of form-letter rejections from publishers and plotting new attempts. Must revise even more, too. Barbara Hale thought novel was “great but awkward”—but the Talking Class which runs publishing is looking for slickness of course. I’m going to North Carolina in few weeks to run brother-in-law’s parking lot and woo a nurse and have a rest from this awful shallow literary world I have to do business with. What’s this about Claude de Maubri [Lucien Carr]? . . . actually true? I turned down job at U.P. [United Press] because it is beneath my dignity, with a novel like that written and rejected like silent sorrowful Sam Johnson. Pfui! Saw The Idiot , loved Rogozhin most. Come over! ( Lundi )
    J.
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    Editors’ Note: Once again Ginsberg wrote to Kerouac about his visions, this time denying that they had happened. Jack wrote in the margin of the letter, “when he was flipping,” which was accurate. Ginsberg was never closer to madness than he was during this period.
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    Allen Ginsberg [n.p., East Harlem, New York?] to
Jack Kerouac [n.p., Ozone Park, New York?]
    ca . late summer 1948
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    Dear Jack:
    I am insane does that surprise you? Ha! I think my mind is crumbling, just like crackers. If I had written five minutes earlier I would have wept, if I had written ten minutes earlier I would have told you to leave me alone, if I wait any longer I won’t write at all. I’m afraid I can’t answer you sincerely at the moment. Your letter was so obviously natural. What am I supposed to say? I can see you reading this and telling me coldly to stop posing, because I am posing, posing as if I were posing from the Underground. But I have a great faith in the supreme physician.
    Be that as it may I thought that I impressed you so much with my latest vision that you wouldn’t dare speak to me again without falling on your knees. Well no I don’t think so any more, not because I am more sensible or more just to you, but because I have found a better way of tormenting you, since you’re so open. The whole vision, it’s just rubbish, just a big fantasy. I’m not making this up now, I really knew it while I was telling you, though I only realized it fully later. In fact I don’t even care about it. If you think that that’s my major virtue, a vision, oh no, I have more important things to think about. However, just to ease your mind, the “Vision” had elements of nature in it but it was just a cover up for something more deep and horrible. No not just sex either.
    If you want to know my true nature, I am at the moment one of those people who goes around showing his cock to juvenile delinquents.
    I can’t really answer your letter, though I want to with a good deal of wishing and perception of what level you are on and I would be on.
    You speak of me as obnoxious and I am.
    Let me get out of this rut. Come and see me. No. I will come and see you. I have something to tell you.
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    Jack Kerouac [Ozone Park, New York] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]
    Sat. night Sept. 18, ’48
Wizard’s Shelf
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    Dear Allen:
    I’ve been having some very mad thoughts since I saw you . . . visions that tell me there is no such thing as “life’s bitter mystery,” (Wolfe and others), but—never more clearly could I see that it is a beautiful mystery. And it is a mystery, you know. None of us understand really what we’re doing, whether it’s intentional or not, or whether we consider it this or that—it’s something else we’re doing, all the time, and very beautiful. Even the sharply inpiercing Carrs cannot always know what they’re really doing. After you left that day, I received a call from Tom Livornese 24 and went to his house. We drank and stayed up all night, and went to N.Y. to transact some business of his. I waited for him in a Third Avenue