Allen Ginsberg, in 1976 at Naropa, on Visionary Experience continues from here
– (and concludes here)
Student: How did he (Jack Kerouac) develop his idea of spontaneous writing?
AG: What time is it?
Anne Waldman: It’s time.
Student: It’s a quarter after three.
AG: What time are we going to quit?
Student: 3:30.
AG: Yeah. Let’s see. I’m trying to remember how it developed, actually. Oh, I think from Neal Cassady. He’d met Neal Cassady in ’46. He was tending toward it because he wrote so much, so he was tending toward writing a lot and appreciating what he wrote without having to revise it in notebooks. But I think it was a long letter that Neal Cassady wrote him in ’48 or ’47. Neal wasn’t supposed to be a writer, he was just a friend and a talker and a lover and a big mind-wheel, but not necessarily a literary wheel, but had written him a long letter describing all the girls he’d fucked between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, and all the situations he’d gotten into. I don’t know why he had done it, but it was an outburst of some magnanimous funny storytelling and he decided to show Kerouac what it’d be like if he actually sat down and wrote and talked, instead of being a big New York literary kid, like Jack. The letter was so funny and so full of tiny detail and obviously just outpouring [in an] unrevised but perfect structure, each story told properly with the odd kind of personal detail like, “Oh, God, how horrible!” All that in it. No shame. No fixed idea of what was right and what was wrong. No Henry-James-solidified sense of manners, but just a reflection of the nature of our own manners, the way we actually were. Kerouac realized that if Neal could do it then he could do it, too. If Neal had his own bang-tail mind that he could write on, then Kerouac could do it, too. So he began writing prose that way. Turned on, I think, by that long letter of Cassady’s.
Also, Kerouac around that time developed the idea of sketching, which was sitting in the middle of the room of the universe, listening to sounds that came in the window — sketching the sounds, like the soft hush of a car roaring up the asphalt, or the trees. So just the sound. Or the sound of a midnight car-door being slammed – “Flumph” – that soft click slam of the 1950s cars. So he began sketching sounds, many of which are in the early parts of the book Visions of Cody . Then he began thinking of each session of writing as a chapter, or number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – the numbers not being chapters of a story but chapters of writing. So maybe a lazy man’s out. Lazy man’s method. Yeah? Well, we may as well stop for good.
I think it grew out of that.
Tape and class end here