Kerouac, Jack | Typed letter to Allen Ginsberg, offering advice on poetry, and Neal Cassady

Kerouac, Jack

Typed letter to Allen Ginsberg, offering a lengthy critique of his poetry, and advice on a disagreement with Neal Cassady

2 pages (275 x 211 mm), single-spaced on the versos of the Housing Authority of the County of Marin interoffice letterhead, Marin City, California, 26 August 1947, signed "J." in type, with a ten word autograph emendation, and small postscript sketch titled "scene outside my window" in pencil; previously folded, small staple holes at upper left, very lightly creased and spotted.

Offering literary and personal advice to to Ginsberg "as father to son"

Beginning what is, in fact, a fairly lengthy letter, Kerouac writes: "Dear Allen — A short, pithy letter. Having just written a long letter to Neal, in which a lot of information is contained to which you may refer... About your poem 'Last Stanzas in Denver' ... My impressions of your poem ... Qu'est que ça veux dire? — To me it means, and to me alone (altho I'll be better on your other stanzas), to me it means that you are sad, but passing it off as art, which is not real life, faithful merriment, and so on — and you yet use it in search of pure fact, or the reality you wish embodied in yourself. I too can be ambiguous."

Kerouac types out and responds to each stanza in turn. Of note, Ginsberg's poem includes the line "Sad Paradise it is I imitate, / and fallen angels whose lost wings are sighs." This is quite possibly the inspiration for Sal Paradise, the narrator and main character of On the Road, and Kerouac's own pseudonym. The prose eventually morphs into a larger pronouncement on Ginsberg's pervasive sadness and disappointment with how his relationship with Cassady was faring.

"In what you're trying to do is contained all that's best in the world: it's a wonderful life you're weaving for yourself, the way I look at it: but the way you look at it, not so wonderful, just impulsive, necessary, matter of fact ... A little less Yiddish contempt and a little more Jewish understanding. Be fair, be just, forgive everything. Forget a word like skeptical and use the word melancholy. Forget the facts and think of the things, all the things ... But really, be happy and don't waste your energy comparing yourself, your mistakes, with the stupidities of others. Why man we're all stupid."

A fine letter from Kerouac to Ginsberg at the beginning of the Beat movement

REFERENCE:

Selected Letters: 1940-1956, ed. A. Charters, pp. 119-123