Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg by Jack Kerouac

Author:Jack Kerouac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] to

Jack Kerouac [n.p., New York, New York?]

November 26, 1954

Fri

Nov. 26

Dear Jack:

Last nite walked drunk [Al] Sublette over Chinatown at 3 AM to Hotel Marconi and packed him up for farewell to his fine window overlooking the corner Bway and Columbus and skyline ranging out above. Taxi to Pier 37 and aboard the Santa Lucia for him to South America, Acapulco and Chile. He staggered around lugging his sides [records] and record machine and I with two valises and then we wandered around the ship. I guess my next big move will be to ship again. Maybe sometime in spring and also as a yeoman or perhaps see if I can get a purser type shot and make money. Certainly to Europe in one and half years. Poor Bill’s left by boat I guess, supposed to the 20th and I haven’t heard since the 17th. What a sad mess. Amazing to think that (as I am sure) our relationship will suddenly have changed to some strange distant Bill distance in Bill—perhaps no longer the eager Bill of before (I mean a year ago, two years ago) with mutual ignu marks and stars. He feels maybe that I am a paranoid [Hal] Chase suddenly cutting off his finger, unforgivable, and will no longer be able to address me without self-consciousness. But I suppose if we were to meet again in some dark corner of a Kasbah we’d be all right understanding again with no thought of this woe. And how different will I feel toward him having “as it were” tweet tweet found a limit to what I would do for him and by implication for you or Lucien or Neal, and by implication vice-versa. Almost an F. Scott Fitzgerald disillusioning. And what would I do with a pilgrim soul if I did find a real one here in S.F.? I said to Sheila last night, in the middle of a hassle about why I don’t love her really. I thought maybe because I loved men too much, but do I do that any more like I used to?

Neal came by the other nite and got me hi and I fed him, Sheila slept, we talked, he went out to wander in North Beach. Not much work on RR, off longer periods of time. But every time you talk to him as soon as it gets interesting he suddenly turns a switch in his head and the CAYCE Jones Locomotive blackens the horizon—he begins repeating the same ideas, more simplified and unrelated (whirling around fragments of former perceptions and mad thoughts) in answer to anything that he thinks about for more than 37 seconds. It all gets channeled. Except for chess, as he complains, cunt and chess and Cayce, beyond that he’s a blank, can’t listen to a paragraph of writing easily, nor read, hardly seems to notice the weird Chinese paintings I prop up for his delight on the table, says “uhhuh.” Then looks up and sadly says, “Can’t concentrate any more—except on chess.

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