Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac - 2

 "I would say he [Jack Kerouac]  offered his heart to the United States and the United States rejected his heart. And he realized what suffering the United States was in for, and so the tragedy of America, as (Walt) Whitman had seen the tragedy of the United States. "When the singer of the nation finds that the nation has sickened, what happens to the singer of the nation?" This is Gregory Corso's question. 

And America, by his day, was sick. Militarily sick. Military-Industrial-Complex had taken over. Hard-heartedness had taken over. Everything that as a Canuck-peasant Kerouac hated had taken over - the mechanization, the impersonality, the homogenization, the money-grabbing, the disrespect for person - that had all taken over. And vast wars - and the attack on the provincial in the wars.  

So I would say America broke his heart."

(Allen Ginsberg - from Hermenegilde Chiasson's 1987 documentary, Jack Kerouac's Road - A Franco-American' Odyssey  - the entire film may be viewed here)

and more Ginsberg-on-Kerouac 
- on his infamous appearance, in 1968, on William Buckley's "Firing Line"  (from the Malcolm Hart, Lewis Macadams, Richard Lerner, 1986 documentary,  "What Happened to Kerouac?" (DVD extras) )



Here's the programme in question

AG: "So the question is what happened when William Buckley invited Jack Kerouac to “Firing Line”, his program, 1968, late. (William) Burroughs had just come back from Chicago (1968) tear-gas Convention and was staying, at the expense of Esquire magazine, to write an article, in some uptown hotel on the East Side, and Jack came down from Lowell with his brothers in laws ..maybe Mike and Tony Sampas, or a couple of his friends, or brothers-in-law from the Greek family of his wife, and he was drinking, and he was in a sports shirt and sports jacket and kind of like blue-collar-looking pants, (and) I think he had a little hunting cap or something like that, and his big guys who were with him who were trying to keep him from drinking, but taking care of him, were very gentle and very friendly, and curious to see - “this is Burroughs?, this is Ginsberg?” - and friendly, and, sort of.. Kerouac was, as ever, being absent-minded, funny, insulting, cheerful, dear, tippling (carrying his bottle, talking about his bottle) had a hip flask.

Jack thought he was going to have this big intelligent conversation with Buckley. We got there, came down in a cab or something, (and) who do we meet on the sidewalk but Ed Sanders? What’s Ed doing there? Ed’s supposed to be on the show. So we went up the elevator with Ed, and Kerouac said, “I don’t know you. Why are you on this show? Why are they putting hippy beatniks on this show?”, and Ed said, “But Jack, I’m your.. you’re responsible for me! I came out of your On The Road, or, I came out of your art. I’m your child, or, I’m your second generation. You’re my father”. And Jack was being really sort of ugly drunk disgruntled. Normally when I went on the program, I went on one-to-one with Buckley and someone of Jack’s stature, I would have imagined, would have gone on one-to-one. Instead, he was set up on a panel with the young beatnik Ed Sanders and some guy who’s a professor of sociology who’s going to sit and…examine him as a specimen or somethin’.

(Because) he realized that, in some way or other, he was set up – to be the object of discussion, rather than a grown-up discusser. Because it really was.. You know, I don’t see how it could have arrived at that situation where he didn’t know that he was.. where… where he was set up not to be alone, one-to-one, but set up, as sort of an object, on a panel.

His agent should have been out there with a limousine or his assistant bringing him in and explaining the situation and smoothing it away, saying “Mr Kerouac will not appear if he does not get the twenty minutes he was invited to do, because he is the central person and has prepared a statement – and, don’t do this” -  or, he himself could have handled it that way – but he didn’t. So he acquiesced in the situation, out of some kind of confusion and also basic kindness – he didn’t want to make trouble. So I remember Buckley asking him, very interestedly, " And what do you think about the Vietnam War?", hoping that Kerouac would make some either left-wing diatribe or some right-wing denunciation of the lefties, and instead Kerouac gave this magnificent answer, which floored Buckley, which was – “Ah, all them South Vietnamese wanna do is get hold of our jeeps!” – (which is something like “all these welfare-chissellers wanna do is get hold of our tax-payer’s money!”) – and of course Buckley could have no answer!– because it was accurate, because it really was that corrupt South Vietnamese military Catholic elite, you know, corrupt and getting.. making money off the war. So it was really a brilliant and incisive, very funny, answer.

But.. Kerouac wasn’t really paying attention, he wouldn’t relate to Sanders (though Sanders on the screen said, I think you’re good, you’re my father) and he wouldn’t relate to the sociologist [Lewis Yablonsky] (who was kind of dumb, I think, who was just applying non-esthetic, non-art standards to an artist and didn’t understand art, thought Kerouac was a social phenomena rather than an artist – and (who?) mispronounced his name a number of times - (and) the guy got upset, thinking that he was being anti-Semitic, (which Jack was - but sort of rightfully, because he was being attacked constantly by all the New York Jewish intellectuals who did have a vendetta against him – beginning with a guy named Bernstein, [Theodore M Bernstein] an editor at the New York Times who hated Kerouac, according to family gossip brought to us by Ernest Von Hartz, a co-editor on the New York Times, [& the father-in-law to Lucien Carr] who said that Bernstein was so afraid and scared of Kerouac that he did everything he could to smutch his name in the New York Times - that should be known, that’s (not only) a little footnote - or to leave him sort of prey to attack if anybody wanted to attack him,

And Kerouac was so uncooperative, and at times spaced-out, it seemed to Buckley, that Buckley asked me to step in and replace him for this "sociological discussion of the Beat Generation".. [Any Beatnik will do?] -  Yes, so I just said I was some distinguished Beatnik or other..one of two drunks, try this one.. So Buckley I think got upset, because Kerouac was no inconsiderable figure, and Kerouac had spoken nicely to Buckley, and Buckley had invited him in, and here was this great hunk of drunken meat, making witty remarks (and completely irreverent remarks), like destroying the format, by being completely honest and clear. It wasn’t a disaster at all with Kerouac, who was drunk, but one hundred percent frank and one hundred percent real, It was one of the realest programs I ever saw. So I said, naturally, “No, no no no, I didn’t get into this… I wouldn’t dare, you know, replace Kerouac, it would be like a lese majeste

[Allen then reads out Buckley's letter to him, from 1981, in response to an invitation to join him at the 25-Years Celebration of On The Road - the 1981 Naropa Institute Kerouac Conference]

"Dear Allen, Thanks for the invitation. Kerouac was a very special guy, awfully difficult, and I am pleased that somebody is paying such dramatic attention to him, but I should not be included in that number because I am not sufficiently a student. He was very kind to me in several public references and I attempted to be kind in return but I did not take seriously his philosophical odyssey. With warm personal regards, Bill.

Very nice letter  - very literate (which is what Kerouac liked about him, that he was literate). But.. Kerouac also liked..McCarthy..Joe McCarthy, oh yeah, loved McCarthy ..because McCarthy would get up there drunk and, you know, talk funny – he (Kerouac) said, he thought McCarthy was the only honest man in the Senate, (in the sense of someone talks from the top of his mind and says outrageous things, while everybody else is trying to keep it..  everything fine under the cover) (In that sense) McCarthy was a hypocrite. 

From someone with a sort of anti-artist point of view it [Kerouac's "Firing Line" appearance] might have seemed like a disaster, but, actually, as time goes on, Kerouac will look more and more interesting and Buckley will look..the occasion, the necessity to be polite on the occasion  and the necessity  to be rationally coherent and linear on the occasion will fade and the monumentality of Kerouac’s drunken humor will emerge as a kind of tragic-comic Rabelaisian beauty, and his remarks will get clearer (as he was really shrewd, drunken-shrewd – he was very good when he was drunk, he was never at loss for trenchant lines of beauty in poetry).

[Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in 1959 - Photo by John Cohen]

Allen Ginsberg-Jack Kerouac Letters, in case you haven't read it yet, is essential reading

here's profound  self-examination from way back in the Summer of 1945  

AG: "Jean [Jack], you are an American more completely than I, more fully a child of nature and all that is the grace of the earth....To categorize according to your own terms, though intermixed you [and Lucien Carr] are romantic visionaries. Introspective, yes, and eclectic, yes. I am neither romantic nor a visionary [this is 1945 (sic)] 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.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America...I am not a cosmic exile such as (Thomas) Wolfe or yourself for I am an exile from myself as well. I respond to my home, my society, as you do, with ennui and enervation. You cry "oh to be in some far city and feel the smothering pain of the unrecognized ego!" (Do you remember? we were self ultimate once.) But I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence..."

Jack Kerouac's Birthday tomorrow

Jack Kerouac's Birthday

                                         
                                                                                                             


[Jack Kerouac - 1942 Naval Reserve photograph - courtesy The Archive - Sketches on Kerouac]



[Jack Kerouac - Staten Island Ferry Dock, New York City 1953 (Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate)

Jack Kerouac's birthday today! - Happy Birthday, Jack! - Had he lived, he would have been (strange vision!) 91 years old. 

Here are some of our more choice Jack Kerouac posts from the Allen Ginsberg Project: 

Here's Allen reading from Dharma Bums, here's Kerouac reading from American Haiku (for more vintage Kerouac recordings, check out these resources here). Here and here are the (video) record of the first Kerouac conference (in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1973), here's a little interesting addenda.

Two essential Kerouac movies have returned, temporarily, to You Tube - How long will they be up? - it's anybody's guess, but, right now, you can access them here and here. (notes/transcription from John Antonelli's 1985 documentary may be found here)

Speaking of essential footage, there is, of course, this - and this.

Herménégilde Chiasson looks at the French connection (as does Joyce Johnson).

Henry Ferrini looks at Kerouac in Lowell  (see also this past weekend's posting)

Here are four postings on the Ginsberg-Kerouac Letters - here, here, here and here.

Here are observations on Mexico City Blues, and, more recently, the Collected Poems

Our 2010 birthday salute featured Jack's extraordinary phantom baseball imagination, (and), in 2012, a portfolio of Allen's photos of his sweet face.

[Jack Kerouac's proposed design for a paperback cover for his novel, On The Road. (1952)]



[Jack Kerouac interviewed by Fernand Seguin, 1967, Radio-Canada (Montreal) tv]

Picasso's Birthday

Allen had a magazine reproduction of this (Picasso's late self-portrait) taped to his refrigerator in his old East 12th Street apartment. He also had this (Bellini's St Francis in the Desert) but that's a whole other story. Recognitions of self? Glimpses of (im)mortality?  Today we celebrate Picasso's birth, October 25 1881 in Malaga, Spain.

There's the older, and then there's the younger, Picasso - This, (from "At Apollinaire's Grave") - "...the absent hand of Max Jacob/ Picasso in youth bearing me a tube of Mediterranean.." and (similarly from Paris, writing to Jack Kerouac) - "I sat weeping in Cafe Select, once haunted by Gide and Picasso and well-drest Jacob last week writing first lines of great formal elegy for my mother." 

1949 - here's Picasso painting

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 12

Allen and Jack - The Letters

Ellen Pearlman's recent review of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters in the current Brooklyn Rail, reminded us again (as if we needed reminding!) of the centrality and importance of that book. We noted it here last year, both pre-publication, Publisher’s Weekly, and post-publication (a whole slew of reviews, seven in fact, including two in the New York Times!). Amplifying that link that leads you to those reviews, here’s links to a whole bunch more. Michael Dirda’s review in The Washington Post can be found here. Donald Faulkner for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, here, Paul Maher’s thoughtful piece for PopMatters here Michael H Miller writes in the New York Observer, and Kathleen Daley in the New Jersey Star Ledger. Jonah Raskin’s review (for the Beat Studies Association) may be accessed here. Granta, the English magazine, as well as featuring excerpts from the book, featured in its July 2010 coverage, a fine interview with editor, our dear friend, Bill Morgan.

Ellen Pearlman in her essay, writes:

What is clear from reading through these 450 pages of Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s correspondence is how absolutely certain they both were of success, of the impeccability of their vision, the importance of their work, and of the snobbery and ignorance endemic in much of the publishing and literary worlds

Ambition/Self-Knowledge

Interestingly, that chimes in with another recent posting on Allen. Bob Ingram, writing in The Broad Street Review, about the legendary “underground newspapers”, Underground Newspapers: The First Blogs, and, in particular, his tenure, “back in the seventies”, as editor of the Philadelphia “alternative newspaper”, The Drummer:

Hell, even Andrew Wylie, now the arch-druid of today’s literary agents, wrote for The Drummer with his partner, the elfin Victor Bockris, under the byline Bockris-Wyle. I remember they did a two-part interview with the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. I was at my desk in The Drummer’s office on Germantown Avenue in Nicetown, typing Ginsberg’s name for some reason, when the phone rang and – lo and behold – it was Allen himself.

“Wow, Allen, man,” I exclaimed. “I was just typing your name.”

He replied he didn’t have time for any metaphysical bullshit; he wanted to correct some errors in Bockris-Wylie’s interviews so that literary critics 50 years later would have the right information. That’s how sure he was of his place in American poetry.

Speaking of rave reviews, here’s a nice one of Allen’s current London photo show, by a self-confessed “massive fan of the Beats”, in Lomography magazine. The title, The Photographic Genius of Allen Ginsberg, says it all.

Doodles

Last week, we noted Allen’s doodles and some of his more inspired, more sophisticated, drawings and inscriptions – stumbled across this 1994 drawing this week (for the New York book-seller, Paul Rickert). Ah!

There must be a whole bunch of such mini-masterpieces out there.

Meantime, to give this whole topic some kind of context, here’s an overview, Idle Doodles by Famous Authors, by Emily Temple (“After all, John Keats”, she writes, “doodled flowers in the margins of his manuscripts..”)

Rainbow Honor Walk

As reported in The Advocate. (Will Kane in the San Francisco Chronicle breaks the story), Allen is one of the first batch of twenty people (“chosen by local residents and merchants”) to be celebrated, literally, on the streets of the Castro, on the Rainbow Honor Walk. An equivalent to the Hollywood Walk of Fame it’s proposed there be a strip along Market and Castro Street with name-plaques and everything, “that recognizes LGBT notables” - Like who?.. well, among the first twenty names, Oscar Wilde, Frida Kahlo and....Allen Ginsberg!

Jack Kerouac And Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. New York Sunday Times Review

Ok, this is really old news, but better late than never, yes. Well, we kinda didn't jump all over this review since we're not totally thrilled with it. It's not a bad review by any stretch, but there's no real direct engagement with the substance of the letters. It is a big review nevertheless, and, besides, the Letters even got another mention last Sunday in the New York Sunday Book Review's ' Editors' Choice' section. That makes 3 mentions in the times in just one month!

Jump over to The Times online to read it there, or you can double click our nifty jpgs below.

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. Reviews streaming in

John Cohen/Getty Images
A late-1950s New York minute: clockwise from far right, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso (in cap), the painter Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac and the musician David Amram.

Been very pleased with the positive press devoted to the Kerouac -Ginsberg correspondence book Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. This kind of attention shouldn't come as a huge surprise, given the stature of the two, and it is difficult to negatively critique letters that weren't quite intended for the public. At any rate, the most recent comes from NY Times' Janet Maslin, and we're told to expect a Sunday Times review from them this Sunday. Kesey Biographer, Robert Faggen, offers a glowing review in the LA Times, Chicago Sun Times publisher John Barron offers a short but sweet one, and Steve Silberman for the SF Chronicle also touches on Bill Morgan's The Typewriter is Holy. Other smaller papers have joined in, including The Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Portland Oregonian. The oddest one comes via The Boston Globe that suggests somehow we should hear more 'solos from Gary Snyder, John Clellon Holmes, Corso, Burroughs and others...'

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

We've been a bit remiss in posting reviews of the Kerouac/Ginsberg correspondence that's official pub date is tomorrow. So to catch up a bit, check the The New York Observer's review from last week if you haven't already seen it, and then check the Kirukus review (which mistakenly has the idea this is just the first of two volumes). Last but not least, Granta have published two excerpts from the book in their most recent online issue.

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

First review of Jack Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg: The Letters is in. This from Publishers Weekly who usually get out the first reviews. The book is set for a July 12 pub date.

"Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, Viking, $35 (528p) ISBN 978-0-670-02194-9

At times loving, at others blistering, sarcastic, often uncomfortably self-lacerating and intimate, these 200 letters, collected in a heroic editorial effort by Ginsberg biographer Morgan and independent editor Stanford, cover the years 1944–1963, the most fertile in the creative lives of Kerouac and Ginsberg. A disbelieving Ginsberg writes to Kerouac in 1952 that On the Road is unpublishable, while Kerouac asks Ginsberg to treat his magnum opus as the next Ulysses. Kerouac immediately praises Howl in 1955, and in return Ginsberg gives Kerouac the manuscript while recounting, like any hopeful author, how freebies have gone to Eliot, Pound, Faulkner. Throughout, the sometimes sporadic letter writing is filled with fragments of works in progress and pungent observations on the authors and publishing people who influenced them, from Dante and Gide to Malcolm Cowley and Sterling Lord. There also is plenty of gossip about Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, and others in the circle. A growing rift concludes the 1950s, as literary fame mixed with alcohol weighs on Kerouac, though these soul brothers reunite through letters of the early 1960s. On receiving Ginsberg’s work, Thelonius Monk exclaimed, "It makes sense." In its strange way, so does this intense and offbeat correspondence. (July 12)"

The Letters of Allen Ginsberg/The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg & Gary Snyder

We unleashed two major letters collections last fall, and they're long overdue. I should add their near simultaneous pub dates were quite by accident, but what's done is done. You might want to run to the nearest fine bookstore or library in your neighborhood and see just what the fuss is all about. The Letters of Allen Ginsberg is the culmination of years and years of relentless sifting and searching by bibliographer & biographer Bill Morgan who set for himself the monumental task of reducing some 3700 letters into a manageable book of 165 letters.

So when Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint approached us with the idea of a Snyder/Ginsberg correspondence, Bill Morgan, fresh off the Letters project was the obvious choice as editor.

Bill Morgan and Kerouac editor David Stanford are co-editing a selected correspondence between Ginsberg and Kerouac, that should be in stores this fall. We'll keep you posted.

New York Times Book Review

[photo: Summer 1965, 8 day backpack climbing in wilderness area of Northern Cascades, Glacier Peak, Washington State, Gary Snyder back from a near-decade in Kyoto studying & practicing Zazen. My first mountain walk. (Ginsberg Caption) licensing: corbis]