Pen Pals: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Literary World They Made
By JANET MASLIN
Published: New York Times, July 19, 2010

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.


JACK KEROUAC AND ALLEN GINSBERG: THE LETTERS
Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford
500 pages. Viking. $35.

THE TYPEWRITER IS HOLY
The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation
By Bill Morgan
291 pages. Free Press. $28.
 
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s more crazily virtuosic letters to his sometime soul mate, Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg included an apology of sorts. “I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your pity,” he wrote. He also looked back on his life as an artist and described it witheringly: “Art has been for me, when I did not deceive myself, a meager compensation for what I desire.” And he acknowledged being worn, enervated and world-weary. “I am sick of this damned life!” he complained.

The year was 1945. Ginsberg was a precociously ancient 19-year-old. He would grow friskier, more pragmatic and less self-dramatizing during the course of his long correspondence with Kerouac, but one thing never changed: Ginsberg’s insistence on keeping the friendship alive. It lasted until Kerouac disappeared into an alcoholic haze and died in 1969, despite Ginsberg’s best efforts to save him.

Many of the two men’s letters went to separate university archives, Kerouac’s to Columbia, and Ginsberg’s to the University of Texas. And there they sat for decades, not without good reason. These letters can be as long-winded, rambling, visionary and impenetrable as each man’s writing style would suggest. But they can also be sharp, lucid, funny, tender, intimate, gossipy, jubilant and absolutely honest about the two aspiring authors’ gigantic ambitions

And if their correspondence sounds one loud cautionary note, it’s a warning to be careful of what you wish for. The free-spirited energy of their early communications can be seen slowly ossifying into the discourse of eminences too busy being famous to be friends. As Kerouac predicted to their mutual friend and mentor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “Someday ‘The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac’ will make America cry.”

In the seductive collection they’ve called “Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters,” the editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford stake out a distinct piece of literary turf. They do this despite the fact that Kerouac and Ginsberg were expansive letter writers, that each wrote to many correspondents, and that reams of these other letters have already shown up elsewhere. A third of the Kerouac-Ginsberg letters in this bumpy but transfixing volume have also been published before.
Much more at NYT.