Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg by Jack Kerouac

illusion. I am really talking to myself, not to you. These are my decisions that I’m speaking of I guess and projecting them to you. How true they are for you I don’t know. But you are certainly advanced beyond my comprehension, when I try to comprehend or “help” in a sacerdotal way, etc. etc.
    I want to see you. I feel more and more at home with you now actually than ever before, I feel you more, actually more clarity, more confidence, more trust. I will be in Paterson for several weeks. Will you come in, at last?
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    Jack Kerouac [n.p., North Carolina?] to
Allen Ginsberg [Paterson, New Jersey]
    ca. December 16, 1948
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    Allen:
    I am aware that Reginald Marsh, and his cool change from tense faults and naturalism, to God’s-eye view of man in the God-real world, is great. (SPOKEN IN A DEEP VOICE.)
    Not screaming over the telephone—you and Barbara [Hale] are queers.
    You ought to go to the Rehn Gallery and dig “New Gardens.”
    Do you know what I think?—People in this century have been looking at people with a naturalistic eye, and this is the cause of all the trouble. I think women are beautiful goddesses and I always want to lay them—Joan [Adams], Barbara, all—and I think men are beautiful Gods including me, and I always want to put my arm around them as we walk somewhere.
    Last night I wrote an apocalyptic letter to [Allan] Temko and I made a copy of it to show to you and maybe [John Clellon] Holmes. It is full of “frightening” and inescapable predictions, scatalogically smeared with an evil leer sometimes, much as “old me, old spontaneous me” is that way. All truthful words are that way . . . “Snake Hill was so-called for a very real, snaky reason.” “If that’s the case, then I am glad that shadow changes into bone.”
    I said to Temko—“When we get out of the narrow ‘white light’ of our surface rationality—when we get out of the room—we will see that mystic makes no mud.”
    However, I hate you. Because years ago you and Burrows [Burroughs] used to laugh at me because I saw people as godlike, and even, as a husky football man, walked around godlike like, and Hal [Chase] did that too, and still does. We long ago realized our flesh happily, while you and Bill used to sit under white lamps talking and leering at each other. I think you are full of shit, Allen, and at last I am going to tell you. You are like David Diamond 30 —you confused your claw with the hand of a godly man; you confused affection. I am sick of you, I want you to change: why don’t you die, give up, go mad, for once.
    I have decided that I am dead, given up, gone mad. Thus I speak to you freely. I don’t care any more. I may get married soon, too—to Pauline maybe. We’ll run away. I am on the verge now of loving my geekish guilty-flesh self—thus reverting to the original sanity of the Hal-days. The reason why I always dream of torturing and murdering Bill (as last night) is because he made me geekish in the name of something else. However, I wrote a big letter to Bill and am sending him Tea Party. I am lost. The only thing to do is to give up—I am giving up.
    Thinking of getting a job in a gas station, I shudder as before. I’m lost. If my book doesn’t sell, what can I do? As I write this to you I am on the verge of falling dead from my chair. Just now I felt myself swooning. It is too much, too close to death, life. I must learn to accept the tightrope.
    Do you know what Hal does? Like Julien Sorel, 31 the moment he enters a seminary, he says to himself, “There are 383 seminarists in here, or rather, 383 e-ne-mies . . .” The only seminarist who befriends him is, therefore, “of the 383 enemies the one and greatest enemy.” I think Hal is full of shit.
    I am full of shit too. Don’t you see? we’re ALL full of shit, and therefore we can be saved.
    In the