Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz continues from here
AG: He heard it out of Lucien Carr‘s mouth. These are imitations of Lucien Carr talking a little bit drunk – “Hey, Kerouac the trouble with you is you never got away from your mother’s apron strings and you might as well go back there to Lowell and bury your nose in the old-time Boston cod instead of coming around to New York and twirling your little butt around the United Press” – something like that – it’s sort of drunken newspaperman talk – or the tone, actually, I would characterize it as.. a tone characteristic of alcohol, alcoholic newsmen. “Why, you’ve never see any revolutions in Guatemala like I’ve seen revolutions in Guatemala” – (if you’ve ever heard newsmen talk about their Costa Rican tragedies over a beer on Third Avenue in New York, arguing over whose journalistic macho-hood was more magniloquent!). I think Kerouac got all that playfulness there. Then, Lucien also, as he mentions in here, had a real pure tongue, a beautiful tongue and was a.. . We all considered him the great Shakesperean tongue among us and he actually never did write anything, except little things that entered into our writing (and he wrote most of the news that we’ve been reading for the past thirty years over the United Press, actually, he edited all that, so actually his volume of literature is much vaster, but invisible). But Lucien finally concluded that he didn’t want to “cast any shadow” (unlike us egotists!) – He said, “I got my life full enough, I don’t need to cast a shadow – Ginzy, you need to cast a shadow of some sort?”
It’s very similar to the (Chogyam) Trungpa statement, “You can’t watch your own death”. As a criterion of egoless-ness – you can’t watch your own death.
Student: What did Lucien Carr work in?
AG: The night bureau manager of the New York United Press at the moment – as of 1945 or 1946, so all this time he’s been sitting at that one desk doing that. He said – “Well, when the Martians arrive, I want to be there to report it ”
He had various reasons for being that but…
Recently there have been a lot of biographical works on Kerouac in which Carr has been friendly and participated but setting his own ground rules and limiting his own shadow. So I always feel uncertain when I’m talking about him because he doesn’t want to cast a shadow and it’s kind of like invasion of his privacy. Except that everybody loves him so much and he was so central to everybody’s mythology that it’s hard to give a course in the Literary History of the Beat Generation without adducing his tongue, as part of the literary background, actually.
The great document of that, or documentation is a text called “Old Lucien Midnight”, which was later re-titled “Old Angel Midnight”, and written in the mid.. late ‘Fifties and published, I think, almost complete, in the Big Table issue of 1958-59 (and where is that republished, do you know, Paul (sic) – Old Angel Midnight, where is that in a book? is that in Lonesome Traveler ?
Student: (Paul Brouliette): No, it’s not.. It’s in the green folder..
AG: Oh it’s not collected in..?
Student: (Paul Brouilette)’ Well part of it is..
AG: Yes
Student (2): I was in England last month and I found a copy of that printed by a small press, in Wales.. [Editorial note – Old Angel Midnight was published by by Unicorn Bookshop Llanfynydd, Carmarthen in 1976]
AG: “Old Angel Midnight”?
Student: Yes
AG: I think two parts exist. There’s one part in..
PO: Big Table
AG: In Big Table. I think that’s the major chunk and then there were some little more added in Evergreen Review. And I don’t know where you’ll find the whole thing.. That’d be a great thing. to. . I think (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti once wanted to put it out, or Kerouac wanted Ferlinghetti to put it out and Ferlinghetti didn’t want it for some reason or other (he didn’t understand it)
So it was Kerouac’s Lucien-esque gibberish, a Joycean Finnegans Wake-style unconscious language, really pretty, based mainly on Lucien’s language, (which he seemed to hear Shakespeare through Lucien Carr’s speech)
Audio for the above can be heard – here, beginning at approximately fifty-four minutes in and concluding at approximately sixty two minutes in