Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac continues from here
Student: Do you think that whole idea of ‘Rack my hands with labor of nada” as being the idea of pursuing, maybe, the vanity-half of that personality, as opposed to… He mentions later in the book, talks about what it would take for him to be a true Christian, so to speak..
AG: Oh, this is Vanity of Duluoz
Student: Yeah, in the end, in the end, he started talking about that. He started to see the truth. He pursued it more or less in his writing, you know, and ended up being the big boo-hoo Jack Kerouac..
AG: Yeah
Student: ..and talked about the loneliness and the emptiness, at the end, and kind of bewailed the fact that he couldn’t muster up himself to take on the spiritual teachings of Buddhism or even his own Christianity
AG: Yeah
Student: Do you also see that kind of..as a a play-off?… (next-to-last-page)
AG: Yeah, the next-to-last page, I was looking over that today… (when) his father’s buried:
“So the undertakers come and dump him in a basket and we have him hearsed up to the cemetery in New Hampshire in the town where he was born and little idiot birds are singing on the branch. At one point the bluejay mother throws the weakling out of the nest and he falls to the foot of the tree and thrashes there dying and starving.A priest tried to console me. I walk with my Uncle Vincent Duluoz after the funeral through the little streets of Nashau and understand, from his silence, why he was always considered the ‘mean’ and ‘uncommunicative’ Duluoz. He was the honest one. He said “Your father was a good boy but he was too ambitious and proud and crazy. I guess you’re the same” – “I don’t know” – (says Jack) – “Well in between, I never disliked Emil. But there you have it, and him, and I’m dying myself, and you’ll die someday, and all this, poof, ca s’en vas (all this, poof, it goes). He made a Breton Gallic shrug at the empty blue sky above.
Of Uncle Vincent, you could not say he was a victim of the vanity of Duluoz.”
“But I still was a victim, went back to Ozone Park with Ma, she did the spring housecleaning (the old man gone, clean the house, drive the Celtic ghosts out) and I settled down to write, in solitude, in pain, writing hymns and prayers even at awn, thinking “When this book is finished, which is going to be the sum and substance and crap of everything I’ve been thru throughout this whole goddam life, I shall be redeemed”
“But, wifey, I did it all, I wrote the book, I stalked the streets of life, of Manhattan, of Long Island, stalked thru 1,183 pages of my first novel” – ((talking about The Town and The City – which includes a giant account of his father’s death and of meeting Huncke and Burroughs and myself) – (and) “sold the book, got an advance, whooped, hallelujah’d, went on, did everything you’re supposed to do in life.
But nothing ever came of it. No ‘”generation” is “new”, “There’s nothing new under the sun” “All is vanity” – ( (all quotations around the biblical quotes) –
And last chapter – XV of Book 13. – “Forget it, wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow’s another day. Hic calix! Look that up in Latin, it means “Here’s the chalice”, and be sure there’s wine in it.”
And then he died a year later of over-drinking
So well, what, hard to tell. In other words.. Your question is.. was it the vanity of writing, or was it the writing? – or is there some separation? is there even some way of..
Student: There’s even a part at the beginning, where, I guess, someone of spiritual bent, a woman, wrote a letter to him and said that there was essentially no “Jack Kerouac” Kerouac never existed, that type of thing, and he went into an explanation of…
AG: Well he got pissed off at that
Student: Yeah …saying something like “who is he that is not “he” because of an idiot”s ignorance?”- and the whole time too. that attachment to..
AG: Yes I’ll read that.. because it’s a very funny thing… because I couldn’t figure out what this phrase meant there – including an attack on Communism because he really was a sourpuss at that point:
“The reason I’m so bitter and, as I said, in anguish, nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody’s begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things” – (there’s a rhetoric here – the rhetoric of (Les gens disent que je me souviens de rien, je me souviens de beaucoup choses) ,which is actually a paraphrase of Louis Ferdinand Celine‘s prose, which is sitting on our reading-list and I suggest you go. check out Journey to the End of the Night – New Directions – Louis Ferdinand Celine… (I think it’s New Directions) – or Mort A Credit (Death on The Installment Plan) – those are basic books (attitudinal reference-books as well as prose reference-books for all of Kerouac’s prose and all of Burroughs’ prose, and I understand that Gregory Corso in his Socratic poetry rap of the second session this summer will be assigning the later books, I think – Guignol’s Band or Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
Student: Nord
AG: North – Nord. – And Michael Brownstein has been using Celine for his prose. So I guess for the Kerouac School, Celine is a foundation stone. Doctor Ferdinand Destouches, who wrote under the pseudonym Louis Ferdinand Celine, who had a somewhat paranoiac attitude (as Kerouac had a little elegant touch of, in his toping old age )
“The reason I’m so bitter and, as I said, in anguish, nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody’s begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I’ve forgotten some)” – (like that football score) – “but I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it’s an innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin” – (if he heard me in this scene here, he’d turn over in his grave – a mortal sinner, Ginsberg) – “but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectical propaganda and Comintern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar, assumes that the truth-teller is lying too. (Dialectical Materialism and the Comintern techniques were the original tricks of Bolshevik Communism, that is you have the right to lie, if you’re on the Bullshivitsky side). Thus that awful new saying, “you’re putting me on“. My name is Jack (“Duluoz”) Kerouac and I was born in Lowell, Mass, on 9 Lupine Road on March 12, 1922. “Oh, you’re putting me on”. I wrote this book Vanity of Duluoz. “Oh you’re putting me on”. It’s like that woman, wifey, who wrote me a letter awhile ago, saying of all things, and listen to this: “You are not Jack Kerouac. There is no Jack Kerouac. His books were not even written”. They just suddenly appeared on a computer she probably thinks, they were programmed, they were fed informative confused data by mad bespectacled egghead sociologists and out of the computer came the full manuscript, all neatly typed doublespace, for the publisher’s printer to simply copy and the publisher’s binder to bind and the publisher to distribute, with cover and blurb jacket, so this inexistent “Jack Kerouac” could not only receive two-dollar royalty cheque from Japan, but also this woman’s letter.
Now David Hume was a great philosopher, and Buddha was right in the eternal sense, but this is going a little bit too far. Of course.it’s true that my body is nothing but an electro-magnetic gravitational field, like that yonder table, and of course its true that the mind is really non-existent in the sense of the old Dharma Masters like Hui-Neng; but on the other hand, who is he that is not “he” because of an idiot”s ignorance?” – (the woman’s ignorance, the idiot woman’s ignorance – “I refuse to become a void. I refuse to become a void on account of that woman anyway”! for other reasons, he’s saying ) “Who is he that is not “he” because of an idiot”s ignorance?” – did you understand it that way?
Student: No, I took it to be… no, just in the idea of his own self, you know that the idea of you know..
AG: But I think he was really mad
Student: … being caught up and being really attached to the drama of his own life and his own suffering and then being kind of stuck in that First Noble Truth..
AG: True
Student:..and never being able to really break through. because he’s got to.. He’s in his mind, right up to his last days and that whole section….
AG: That’s actually quite interesting, tho’ -He’s being, in a way, so off-handedly and elegant about “Hui-Neng, Dharma Masters” . By this time, it’s years, maybe twelve thirteen years, since he considered himself a Buddhist, but he’s still in his mind. Although he puts down the Christians also, any religion, a priest and all that
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twelve-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-two minutes in
to be continued.