MAD TO TALK

JACK KEROUAC AND ALLEN GINSBERG: THE LETTERS

Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford

500 pp. Viking. $35

"Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I
suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are," Jack
Kerouac began a typical letter to his friend Allen Ginsberg in 1950.
"God's angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old
man in a lunch cart, and God - their faces!

I wondered what God was up to." God's purpose would remain opaque to
Kerouac - try as he might to impart some glimpse of it in his work -
and a dec-ade later he was pretty much a burnt-out case. Poring over
his old correspondence with Ginsberg and others in 1961, he sadly
wondered at "the enthusiasms of younger men." "Someday 'The Letters
of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac' will make America cry," he wrote.

And well might we be moved to weep, for any number of reasons: for a
time when "angelheaded hipsters" (as they delighted in mythologizing
themselves) hit the road looking for kicks and Whitmanesque
connection with those (generally male) who were likewise "mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved," when mainstream society seemed
so dull and doomed (by the Bomb, of course) that a wayward life was
all the more fun for being heroic, too. Mostly we weep because we
know it ends badly - for all of us, -really, but especially poor
Kerouac, who became famous and was blamed in part for the beatniks in
Washington Square and the hippies to come. "We gotta get out of NY,"
he wrote Ginsberg in 1959, having warned his friend the year before,
"Beware of California." Already the world - a world he helped create
- - was closing in on him from both sides.

But in the beginning Kerouac's only claque consisted of his fellow
hipsters - among them William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory
Corso and especially Ginsberg, who offered himself as an adoring
little brother.

It becomes clear while reading "Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The
Letters" that, to a remarkable degree, each was dependent on the
other for encouragement and advice, and it's rather astonishing how
well founded their mutual regard proved to be. Even before Ginsberg
published his masterpiece, "Howl" (1956), Kerouac had predicted that
someday his friend would be a "Jewish National Hero": "Ginsberg will
be the name, like Einstein in Science, that the Jews will bring up
when they claim pride in Poetry." And lo, it came to pass. Indeed,
the only writer for whom Kerouac had greater expectations was
himself, and Ginsberg would learn the hard way that it was best to
concur in this. "It's late for me to say it but I see how much better
you are than I," he wrote Kerouac in 1955, two and a half years after
he'd rashly ventured to suggest that a draft of "On the Road"(which
Kerouac had likened to "Ulysses") was "crazy" but "salvageable." He
never made that mistake again.

Kerouac blasted back: "Do you think I don't realize how jealous you
are and how you and -Holmes and Solomon" - their mutual friends John
Clellon Holmes and Carl Solomon - "all would give your right arm to
be able to write like the writing in 'On the Road.' " He added that
he'd like to punch them all "in the kisser," if not for "too many
glasses to take off."

Ginsberg was contrite, and rightly so, since nobody would benefit
from Kerouac's example more than he. "[It] isn't writing at all -
it's typing," Truman Capote remarked, apropos of Kerouac's having
composed "On the Road"via a 120-foot-long roll of tracing paper fed
continuously through his typewriter. Inspired by the spontaneity of
bebop, Kerouac called his method "blowing" or "sketching," and was
eager, as ever, to explain the matter to Ginsberg: "You just have to
purify your mind and let it pour the words (which effortless angels
of the vision fly when you stand in front of reality) . . . and slap
it all down shameless, willy-nilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so
inspired I lost consciousness I was writing."

As one may surmise from Kerouac's prose style (epistolary and
otherwise), a steady ingestion of drugs was also crucial to the
process - primarily Benzedrine to keep the flow going, and marijuana
(or, this being the '50s, "tea") to keep the angels flying.

Ginsberg hipped to that aspect of things, too, and in one letter he
describes staring, stoned on peyote, at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel
in San Francisco, impressed by its -"Golgotha-robot" visage. "This
peyote vision was the original inspiration for Ginsberg's poem
'Howl,' " the editors, Bill Morgan and David Stanford, gloss in a
footnote. "I realize how right you are," Ginsberg enthused of his
breakthrough work, "that was the first time I sat down to blow, it
came out in your method, sounding like you, an imitation
practically." Nor did Kerouac's contribution end there.

Not only did he suggest the title (nixing the author's lame
"Strophes") of what would become perhaps the most famous American
poem of the latter 20th century, but he led the cheering when
Ginsberg introduced "Howl" to the public with a frenzied reading at
the Six Gallery in San Francisco on Oct. 7, 1955.

By then Kerouac had discovered Buddhism, and this is where things
begin to get thick for the reader of these letters.

Two stoned white guys writing almost exclusively about dhyana and the
like - and I can think of no better way to describe the long middle
section of this book - are generally interesting only to each other.
"Neal begins there is no beginning and end to the world, the karmic
- -etheric akasha essence substance vibrating continuously in all the
billion universes and our atman-entities rushing around" is a typical
passage, the like of which made me wish I had a butler standing
behind me exploding paper bags every time I nodded.

Given that Kerouac was beginning to drink too much on top of
everything else ("because of silly elation, wine and benny, I cannot
sit down and practice true dhy-ana"), there is even more of the
blowhard grandiosity, too, with Ginsberg supplying the usual
indiscriminate applause, in the absence of which we might have been
spared "The Dharma Bums" (1958).

Ginsberg, always the more worldly of the two, got a kick out of fame.
"What inevitable mad dream of life we've turned up," he wrote Kerouac
(once Viking had finally published "On the Road" in 1957), wisely
advising his friend, "SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!!!!" Kerouac took this to
heart, more or less: he made drunken jazz records with Steve Allen
and Norman Granz, and waxed indignant when Sloan Wilson sold his
novel "A Summer Place" to the movies for big bucks, whereas Kerouac
was getting jerked around by Marlon Brando (who "doesn't answer
letter from greatest writer in America," he railed, "and he's only a
piddling king's clown of the stage"). In the end, of course, money
was slight consolation for a shy, paranoid man who could scarcely
leave his house anymore without being accosted by the beatniks he
deplored, and never mind riding rails and hitchhiking and "balling
the jack" from one coast to another in Neal Cassady's 1949 Hudson.
What he himself had named the Beat Generation was, he sensed,
drifting away from "Buddha kindness" toward rabble--rousing of the
leftist "blood in the street" sort. "I DON'T WANT NOTHIN TO DO WITH
POLITICS," he roared at Ginsberg, whose own Communist sympathies
(earning him the moniker "Carlo Marx" in "On the Road") were more
suspect than ever. "You and I and Burroughs and Gregory . . . believe
in God and TELL THEM THAT, YELL IT!"

So it went in those sad final years.

The last exchange of letters in the present volume is from 1963; five
years later Kerouac would appear on "Firing Line," William F. Buckley
Jr.'s television program, bloated and drunk, knocking hippies and
explaining the war in Asia as a Vietnamese "plot to get Jeeps into
their country." One year later, at the age of 47, he was dead of cirrhosis.

Ginsberg, meanwhile, became a beloved and quite benign public figure,
paying tribute to his friend's memory by helping to found the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colo. A place for
those who "burn, burn, burn" with literary vocation just might have
pleased Kerouac, whose favorite review of "On the Road" concluded
with the words "O I wish I was young again." That, more than
anything, may have been what it was all about.