Mad to Talk
By Blake Bailey
Published: August 6, 2010, The New York Times

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

“Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are,” Jack Kerouac began a typical letter to his friend Allen Ginsberg in 1950. “God’s angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old man in a lunch cart, and God — their faces! I wondered what God was up to.” God’s purpose would remain opaque to Kerouac — try as he might to impart some glimpse of it in his work — and a dec­ade later he was pretty much a burnt-out case. Poring over his old correspondence with Ginsberg and others in 1961, he sadly wondered at “the enthusiasms of younger men.” “Someday ‘The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac’ will make America cry,” he wrote.

And well might we be moved to weep, for any number of reasons: for a time when “angelheaded hipsters” (as they delighted in mythologizing themselves) hit the road looking for kicks and Whitmanesque connection with those (generally male) who were likewise “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,” when mainstream society seemed so dull and doomed (by the Bomb, of course) that a wayward life was all the more fun for being heroic, too. Mostly we weep because we know it ends badly — for all of us, ­really, but especially poor Kerouac, who became famous and was blamed in part for the beatniks in Washington Square and the hippies to come. “We gotta get out of NY,” he wrote Ginsberg in 1959, having warned his friend the year before, “Beware of California.” Already the world — a world he helped create — was closing in on him from both sides.
The full review at NYT.