Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met at Columbia University in 1944. Thereafter, they kept in contact through an urgent, almost frenzied exchange of letters. Among the distinguishing features of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, is that two-thirds of the 182 letters gathered here have never been published before.
[The following book review was published in the Winter 2010 issue of The Georgia Review (Vol. LXIV, No. 4)]
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford. New York: Viking, 2010. 500 pp. $35.00.
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met at Columbia University in 1944. Kerouac was a twenty-one-year-old ex-student/ex-jock/ex-sailor drunk, Ginsberg a bright, precocious seventeen-year-old freshman who in later years Kerouac would dub the “mystic queer.” Despite the Ivy League credentials of their meeting place, these two men and their wider circle were fringe types, marginalized much as Rimbaud had been in his own time and place. They were earnest writers who sought truth in a world of city streets and limitless roads, and they strove to create a “New Vision” that would leave behind the prevailing conservative ideas about literature. Their lives of intense reading, passionate debate, manic travel, occasional mental breakdowns, brief stays in jail, spiritual searching, alcoholism, drug use, and sexual experimentation gave off a heady whiff of heedlessness and anarchy. Any timid onlooker could assume that someone would get hurt hanging out with their crowd, and a few of their circle did in fact die early and violent deaths.
The literary movement led by Kerouac and Ginsberg, along with William Burroughs and others, called desperately for anything counter to the dominant culture—something resonant and true, something that could whip up the words, the music, the feeling of postwar America. A decade after their first meeting, these icons of the Beat Generation began publishing the pioneering works that laid siege to American conformism and materialism, inspiring a genuine counterculture: Ginsberg’s Howl first appeared in 1956, Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957, and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in 1959.
The three men’s friendship bloomed and endured with some notable complications until Kerouac’s early death from cirrhosis in 1969. They kept in constant contact from the beginning—especially the younger two, Kerouac and Ginsberg—and sustained their communication, when they weren’t visiting each other or living in close proximity, with an urgent, almost frenzied exchange of letters.
Among the distinguishing features of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, is that two-thirds of the 182 letters gathered here have never been published before. To date this constitutes the most comprehensive collection of Ginsberg and Kerouac’s correspondence with one another. (Morgan previously edited The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, and Ann Charters edited two volumes of selected Kerouac letters spanning the years from 1940 to 1969. Volumes of Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s journals have also been published).
Kerouac’s correspondence is archived at Columbia University and Ginsberg’s at the University of Texas. In the early 1970s, Ginsberg coordinated an effort to gather copies of all his correspondence with Kerouac, but once the materials were collected the project faltered under the massive effort involved in the transcription. Morgan and Stanford took on this job and have brought to light all of the previously unpublished material. Reading the product of their labor is an intense, fun, informative, and wild ride. This collection is an eye-opening testimony to the depth of the collaboration Kerouac and Ginsberg fostered as they forged a new American art and idiom.
The first of the letters date from mid-August 1944, when their mutual friend Lucien Carr—a brilliant Columbia undergraduate who introduced them—was arrested for killing an older man who had stalked him for years. Kerouac was arrested too (for helping Carr hide evidence) and was locked up in the Bronx County Jail. One of Ginsberg’s letters to Kerouac from that period sets the tone of their friendship and correspondence for decades to follow: “I’m reading Jane Austen and finishing Dickens’s Great Expectations. I also started Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for the second time for an English course.” No matter what else was happening in their lives—imprisonment, bouts of despair over art, love, money, sex, publication or the lack thereof—their shared passion for literature formed a consistent bond between them.
The two soon began communicating with fraternal intimacy, mutual admiration, and unwavering faith in one another’s talents. Early on they explore and analyze their similarities and differences. Kerouac writes in September 1944, “I find in you a kindred absorption with identity, dramatic meaning, classic unity, and immortality: you pace a stage, yet sit in the boxes and watch.” In July 1945, Ginsberg writes, “I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps).” There were also road bumps, disagreements, and stabs at sarcasm that were misunderstood. At the end of a long letter from September 1945, Kerouac jabs at the younger Ginsberg:
There’s nothing that I hate more than the condescension you begin to show whenever I allow my affectionate instincts full play with regard to you; that’s why I always react angrily against you. It gives me the feeling that I’m wasting a perfectly good store of friendship on a little self-aggrandizing weasel. I honestly wish that you had more essential character, of the kind I respect. . . . And now, if you will excuse me for the outburst, allow me to bid you goodnight.
One source of pleasure for readers of this collection is the mood of high humor and antic mirth that runs throughout, reflecting the free and easy camaraderie that existed among the members of the Beat movement. Consider the various salutations and farewells that Ginsberg and Kerouac exchange: “Cher ape,” “Cher jeune singe,” “Mop,” and “Your fellow creature” are just a representative sample. Kerouac ends one 1952 letter, “I didn’t ask you to go to Paris with me because I need you, I was only being kind to a fellow writer and being traditional, fuck you too. Ti-Jean xxx”).
The letters reveal an astonishing level of creative collaboration, a sort of two-man writing workshop. Struggling at first to define an aesthetic mission, along the way the two men outline their ideas, then debate, review, and revise them. Early in their friend- ship, in September 1944, Kerouac writes: “I prefer the new vision in terms of art—I believe, I smugly cling to the belief that art is the potential ultimate out of the humankind materials of art, I tell myself, the new vision springs.” Then, eleven months later, he retreats enigmatically: “As for artistry, that is now a personal problem, something that concerns only me, so that probably I won’t bother you about that ever again.” But Ginsberg won’t have it. He responds, “Don’t shepherd your artistic problems back into the cave; I’ d like to hear of them since I suppose they’re almost the most important season of your supernal journey, to borrow your metaphor.” If the “new vision” that Kerouac cites in the letter above is the same one that the two would build and refine together and that would frame the Beat movement’s body of work, it’s a relief to see that Ginsberg teased Kerouac out of his silence and helped ensure that their ideas would continue to develop well beyond the limits of their private correspondence.
Many of the letters include parts of works in progress—Ginsberg’s poems, long passages from what would become Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City (1950), and draft snippets from the work that would make him famous, On the Road. These exchanges are particularly fascinating because they show the pair’s keen practical and aesthetic insights. Toward the end of 1948, when Kerouac despaired over publishers’ rejections of The Town and the City (it was accepted for publication the following year) and felt hopeless about ever seeing his novel in print, Ginsberg advised him to look at the manuscript again: “The soul must speak, you must speak out directly, not through literary symbols like ‘Brooding click this.’ You must assume every responsibility in the novel that evades you. Total, total, no superfluity.” Months later, in May 1949, Ginsberg responds to some poems Kerouac sent by once more urging his friend to exert greater artistic control: “What remains, when the meaning of the poems (aside from their passionate, frenzy-poetic being) comes clear to you is to organize them and direct them consciously.”
In 1950, on the eve of the release of The Town and the City, Ginsberg worries that it will be sabotaged on publication by “some commercial slipup unforeseen brought on by Harcourt. Do something,” he warns his friend. “Man the lifeboats. Get Rome on the phone. You have a duty to protect your investments.”
They also engage in a running dialogue about the myriad writers whose work they are reading or plan to read—Hesse, Kafka, Balzac, Faulkner, cummings, Lowell, and Artaud—and they form decisive critical opinions on these authors and their works: “[William Carlos] Williams is right,” asserts Kerouac in a letter from February 1952: “the original impulse of the mind is in the “prose seed” or first wild draft of the poem, the “formal ode” is a dull suit covering the great exciting nude body of reality etc.” A month later, Ginsberg complains, “[James] Joyce is too hard—too much fooling around with verbal ideas and historical abstractions.”
A passage from a July 1955 letter by Kerouac prefigures his later reclusiveness, isolation, and decline: “Turns out that all my final favorite writers (Dickinson, Blake, Thoreau) ended up their lives in little hermitages . . . This I think will be my truly final move.” By the late 1950s we can see the beginnings of Kerouac’s distrust of and disgust with the literary and cultural movement he helped create. The increasing association of the Beat movement with left-wing, politically radicalized elements in society put the Catholic, anti-Communist, and essentially apolitical Kerouac on edge. “I DON’T WANT NOTHIN TO DO WITH POLITICS,” he writes in January 1958, “especially leftist west coast future blood in the street malevolence.” Also, the constant distractions of celebrity take their toll as he starts to act as a kind of guide to the Beat Generation in magazine essays and interviews: “I see now, tho, that fame makes you stop writing, why should a man stop and sketch a railyard when he has to make a publicity appointment?”
The frequency of the correspondence tapers off abruptly after 1959. During the 1960s, Kerouac retreated further into alcoholism and became increasingly conservative and belligerent. His friendships with Ginsberg and other Beats suffered. Ginsberg, meanwhile, thrived and continued to evolve as the Beat movement paved the way for the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. Their divergence bothered Kerouac, who wrote in June 1963, “When you come to my new house in N’Port [Northport, NY] it will be perfect if you don’t have that beard and long hair, who cares about that shit anyway?” Ginsberg’s response four months later is a testament to his friendship and tact, “I come see you Xmas without hair if you so desire me or with hair if you so accept me.” But Ginsberg makes a demand of his own that ultimately (and sadly) Kerouac ignored: “NO LUSHING it destroy feeling in fact get off that lush.”
Kerouac and Ginsberg have attained canonical, legendary stature in American literary and popular culture. The Library of America now offers a handsome volume of Kerouac’s “road” novels for $35. A fortieth anniversary reproduction of the first edition of Howl was released in 1996 (City Lights Books). Ten years later, Harper Perennial published a facsimile of the original draft, and major celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic heralded the fiftieth anniversary of the first reading of the book. A biopic of Ginsberg titled Howl is slated to premier in autumn 2010. Time, history, and the process of canonization can sometimes transform real people into icons. This is true especially of Ginsberg and Kerouac, whom many now recognize as among the titans of twentieth-century literature. What Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters gives us is a close view of the men who made the art, the most intimate insight we have to date of the vibrant lives and intense collaboration of two young men who struggled to find authentic artistic voices and ended up changing their own world and the wider one as well.