Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters [Paperback]

One afternoon in 1944, two aspiring writers met in an apartment a few blocks from the Columbia campus in New York City. The younger of the pair was a 17-year-old poet from New Jersey named Allen Ginsberg. Skinny, bespectacled, and excruciatingly self-conscious, Ginsberg was instantly smitten with the other student -- a blue-eyed, 21-year-old, French-Canadian football player named Jack Kerouac.

Decades later, Kerouac would wryly recall that his first impression of Ginsberg was of "a lecher who wanted everybody in the world to take a bath in the same huge bathtub which would give him a chance to feel legs under the dirty water." After seeing the shy poet say goodbye to each step in his apartment building as he moved out, however, Kerouac recognized Ginsberg as a kindred spirit. Their creative alliance became the central axis of an ever-expanding circle of writers, artists, musicians, and fellow travelers that Kerouac christened the Beat Generation. Many of the authors lionized by academia during the post-war era have been forgotten (read any Conrad Aiken lately?) but the best novels and poems produced by this group - which eventually encompassed William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman and others -- still seem fresh, hip, and relevant.

The result is a Beat revival that has been ongoing since the '70s. A feature film based on Ginsberg's breakthrough poem "Howl" is coming out this September, featuring the hot actor of the moment, James Franco, in a nearly uncanny performance as the young Ginsberg in San Francisco. Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Son Volt's Jay Farrar recently teamed up for a Kerouac tribute called "One Fast Move or I'm Gone." Urban futurist Geoff Manaugh, author of "The BLDGBLOG Book," cites Ginsberg's wide-ranging curiosity as a primary inspiration for his intellectually omnivorous blog.

One of the most industrious toilers in this eternal North Beach of the mind is Bill Morgan, an archivist who negotiated the sale of Ginsberg's voluminous store of papers and personal effects (including his clipped beard) to Stanford University for $1 million in 1994. Morgan has written and edited more than a dozen Beat-related books, including Ginsberg's journals, a 2006 biography of the poet called "I Celebrate Myself," and guides to relevant landmarks in New York and San Francisco.

The collected Kerouac/Ginsberg correspondence, edited by Morgan, is pure literary gold that fans and scholars will mine for decades to come. Ginsberg always gave Kerouac props for turning him into a real writer, but now, readers can see that process in action, as Ginsberg morphs from being the timid author of lovelorn sonnets to the genre-busting powerhouse behind "Kaddish," the epic memoir of his mother's descent into madness.

The letters also challenge some myths propagated by the Beats themselves, such as the notion that Kerouac didn't find his own voice until he read Neal Cassady's benzedrine-fueled accounts of his own sexual exploits in 1950. Kerouac's rapturous descriptions of Manhattan in a letter written two years earlier show that he was already in command of his lyrical flow: "It was too much to believe, near, almost near enough to touch (like the stars), and so huge, intricate, unfathomable and beautiful in its distance, smoking, window-flashing, canyon-shadowed realness there, with the weave of things touching and trembling at its watery apron below."

In 1961, Kerouac predicted to poet and City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti that "someday 'The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac' will make America cry." That day has arrived, and it was worth the wait.

I respectfully disagree with the "greenhornet" review, which complains that Kerouac letters from this collection also appear in the Ann Charters collection. What "greenhornet" fails to take into consideration is the fact that Ginsberg's letters TO Kerouac are not included in the Charters collection, so you get no sense of the "back and forth" flow of the correspondence between these two literary giants and therefore miss (at least) half the story. This collection, however, shows how Jack and Allen's relationship changed over the years. I must say that I absolutely love this book. Check out this ecstatic Buddhist advice from Kerouac: (p. 308). "The mind has its own intrinsic brightness but it's only revealable when you stop thinking and let the body melt away. The longer you hold this position of cessation in light, the greater everything (which is Nothing) gets, the diamond sound gets louder...the transcendental sensation of being able to see through the world like glass, clearer...all your senses become purified and your mind returns to its primal, unborn, original state of perfection Don't you remember before you were born?"
Hooooo weeeee now, that's some cool advice Jack is giving Allen. Because Kerouac and Ginsberg are my two favorite authors, I've actually replaced (on my bookshelf) the Charter books with this collection.

I also absolutely love this amazing collection and wish I had an exceptional soul mate to collaborate with and share my innermost thoughts with like these two had in one another. There are so many ideas, delightful stories from places like bughouses, creative mini poems, literary references, truth, and glimpses into their lives and souls... I am having fun exploring their references each morning after a night of pure pleasure in the company of this book.