Kerouac/Ginsberg: The Letters
‘Your isolation like mine is sad and frightful mainly the blind alleys of money and love but life is not over, and much to be written.’
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, central figures of the Beat generation, were social and literary pioneers, experimenting tirelessly with literature, drugs and sexuality. Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) inspired a generation of youth culture in mid-twentieth-century America, and liberalised permanently what could and could not be published. Below are four letters selected from the pair’s extensive correspondence. Read an interview with Bill Morgan, one of the editors of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters.
Please be reassured, angel, I think dearly of you whenever I do think of you, which is often, as I’m sure you do think of me often and dearly, naturally, and I’m not trying to be mysterious, or quiet, or anything, but just have reached the essence center of things where nothingness resides and does quite absolutely nothing, and this is my Chinese position.
I won’t quote you the Tao, or make demands or impositions, or go into detail about what I been doing, except to mention, as you’ll hear from Edgar Cayce Cassady and Carolyn, my discovery and espousal of sweet Buddha, which has been I guess in a wordly maybe even you sense my undoing, because, tho I always did suspect that life was a dream, now I am assured by the most brilliant man who ever lived, that it is indeed so, consequently I don’t want to do anything any more, no writing, no sex, no nothing, I have abandoned and that is, hope to abandon, all evil outflowings of ‘life’ for all good non-outflowings of mind essence recognition . . . no more Subterraneans to harass you with, or Alenes to kick myself in the ass with and no more anything but a kind of like 1948 realization of the nothingness and the who-cares-anyhow of Lucien drunks . . . tho once in a while I go out, because people call and write, and drink and fuck a little, but always come back, to my room, to do nothing, to take the privilege of doing nothing and claim it for my own, and so that, if my mother should want me to leave, I will and would go to El Paso Texas at first, to wash dishes and live across the river in $4 a month dobe cottage where with my Buddha Bibles and bean stews I would live life of mendicant thinker in this humble earth dream.
