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Ginsberg on Kerouac ... An Interview by Eric Baiz aizer er, , Reywas Div ivad, and Richard Peabody Back in 1978 Eric Baizer, Rick Peabody and Reywas Divad spoke to Allen Ginsberg about Jack Kerouac, who had died nine years earlier. At that point Kerouac’s reputation was beginning to recover from the critical battering he’d suffered during the 1960s and in the immediate years after his death. Ginsberg outlines the Kerouac landscape of the late 1970s for them. The interview appeared originally in Peabody’s tremendous literary journal Gargoyle. Big thanks to him for allowing Beat Scene to republish it here. Interviewers: When going over the media of the time it appears to me that Jack Kerouac was one of the most slandered and libeled writers of recent times. Ginsberg: It’s very interesting that you say that, I read an essay on that last night. There are two large books on Kerouac coming out, a biography by Dennis McNally of Random House, a considerable biography; and a big book, from St. Martin’s Press in New York. archived (by Barry Gifford) documents and interviews with everybody who knew Kerouac. The thing that the McNally biography is great at is accounting and itemization of all the reviews that Kerouac got for all the different books, and it’s one of the most vicious things I’ve ever seen what they did to him. Interviewers: It really was. Ginsberg: And some of it, incidentally, by CIAfunded literary magazines like Encounter, by the way. Not that the CIA had a plug in Kerouac. They had that kind of mentality that would take Kerouac’s open wit, Whitmanic beauty and honesty of person and find that creepy and subjective and egotistical or irresponsible. It’s a conservative, stupid party line. Inter ntervie viewers: ers: Though countless people have e read and like his work, it seems that to this day he is still regar egarded as a second class writer. The word “Literature” is rarely applied to Big Sur or Desolation Angels or Scripture e of the Golden Eter ternity nity. You have e consistently defended him over the years. Looking back at it now, , what kind of place will Kerouac take in literature? Is he still treated unfairly by critics? What should his reputation be? Ginsberg: There’s a guy, Anatole Broyard, of the N. Y. Times Book Review, who’s still chasing Kerouac’s corpse with a stiletto. Even posthumously denouncing Visions of Cody, which I think was Kerouac’s great prose creation. Full of beautiful cadenzas and exquisite sketches of cafeterias and subways and els (elevated lines). I still would say that Kerouac was one of the most beautiful composers of vowels and consonants, one of the most mindfully conscious writers dealing with sounds. As Warren Tallman the essayist pointed out in his great essay in the late fifties, “Kerouac’s Sound,” Kerouac had a fantastic ear and a tremendous appreciation of modern black music and black tongue and Okie tongue and provincial speech, and his rhythms and sentences are organized after the models of excited conversation, probably rhapsody. . . exclamatory delight, you find that built into his prose. He was an athletic prose writer and he was tremendously honest. He gave himself to his art and I think he was one of the great prose writers in America. Perhaps in America, itself, the single greatest in the twentieth century. His breakthrough to a realization of spontaneous mind and the enormous inventive perceptive capacity of raw mind—”first thought is best thought-is something so noble that only a few great Buddhist poets have achieved that. Chogyarn Trungpa, who’s my meditation teacher, a Tibetan lama, thinks that Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues book of poems is “a great exposition of mind,” spontaeous mind, and good 28
Ginsberg on Kerouac Buddhism, too, as Gary Snyder, the trained Buddhist, thinks. All of my poetic practice is founded on Kerouac’s notion of non-revising, “spit forth intelligence at the moment.” It’s in the tradition of twentieth century thought, actually, Western thought. From Heisenberg who said if you stop to observe a wave you impede its function: Einstein who said if you want to know the shape of the Universe, you had to examine the measuring instrument. So what Kerouac was doing was examining his own mind. The thoughts of the mind as they proceeded, rising “unborn” in the mind. He was able to notate on the page and it created a great extraordinary poetic panoply of what comes up from the naked mind, what the naked mind is capable of when it’s not trying to sneak over an arty, academic, shamed, revised version of reality. What does the mind really think? What is the poetry of pure mind? And he was the first person to have that great breakthrough of consciousness in art. Well, not the first, it is a tradition. Gertrude Stein was into that. It actually was a main tradition in American letters from Whitman on. When Whitman said, “We don’t have to pay the immensely overpaid accounts on the Battle of Troy anymore. The muse is here in America. She’s here installed amidst the kitchenware, that’s “ordinary mind.” Williams relied on ordinary speech in his practice of imagism. Gertrude Stein explored the ordinary mind moment by moment in her vast experiment with The Making of Americans in writing creation and composition. Stein is, in a sense, the innovator. But Kerouac applied that ordinary mind rhapsody—that is to say, the unimpeded flow of intelligence—in prose, to telling a narrative story, and there was something monumental about that. I would say he created a monumental “artwork,” despite the hostility of academia, despite sneering journalistic jealousy. Despite the smog of the secret police which 29 scared him, too, and made him withdraw from public front. Despite my own incomprehension and the incomprehension of his friends who sometimes didn’t understand how far he was goin,. ‘cause my first reaction to Visions of Cody was of shock—Where was this? Where was this coming from? It wasn’t like a novel I’d ever heard of. Despite his publisher’s money-grubbing boorishness in not publishing his novels when they were written, in not publishing them in the right order and leaving many to be published posthumously. Despite repression from his family. Despite an attack in the media that was so vast it looks like organized psychosis when you look back on it—friends like Kenneth Rexroth saying that he couldn’t write poetry; Norman Podhoretz attacking him as a juvenile delinquent, instead of seeing him as an artist. Despite all that, one single, lonely tearful guy created this masterpiece against everything. He had to follow his heart, and that’s pure art. His intelligence was extraordinary that way. ‘Cause he read, he was very learned. He had read Shakespeare, a lot of Sir Thomas Browne, read all through Rabelais and Celine, listened to Bach’s B-Minor Mass night after night, and St. Matthew’s Passion. The amazing thing is that even in his illness in the sixties when he was drinking too much, he created a body of work at a time when he was supposed to be in “decline,” a phase that people still insult, this fantastic record of his own breakdown and degeneration from alcohol in Big Sur in 1961. He went on to complete the second part of Desolation Angels, which was a great retrospective of his situation with fame and with “the San Francisco Renaissance” with all the poets (Whalen, Snyder, McClure, Lamantia, Duncan, etc.) Inter ntervie viewers: ers: Those books are e both out of print here in the U.S. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio Orlovsky and Gregory Corso. Mexico, 1956. Photographer unknown.
Page 1 and 2: Number 73 Summer 2014 £4.50 Lew We
Page 3 and 4: Number 73 Summer 2014 Editor ditor.
Page 5 and 6: fall 1972 I moved from California t
Page 7 and 8: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends Du
Page 9 and 10: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends ra
Page 11 and 12: BILL BURROUGHS IN AMSTERDAM by Eddi
Page 13 and 14: Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam ‘Patt
Page 15 and 16: A Half-American Writer During the p
Page 17 and 18: A Half-American Writer Another impo
Page 19 and 20: CONVERSATIONS with KEN KESEY edited
Page 21 and 22: company alongside Charles Olson, Ro
Page 23 and 24: abstract expressionist painters wer
Page 25 and 26: Jeffers is my God interest in it. H
Page 27: Cajoled Not notified of ancient Cur
Page 31 and 32: Ginsberg on Kerouac after being in
Page 33 and 34: Ginsberg on Kerouac Inter ntervie v
Page 35 and 36: ----------- It’s Monday morning.
Page 37 and 38: they discover a dead seal and say,
Page 39 and 40: We pick up all our garbage and spli
Page 41 and 42: eaders. Since I was driving taxi, I
Page 43 and 44: Write a Madder Letter if You Can by
Page 45 and 46: Write a Madder Letter if You Can ho
Page 47 and 48: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction by Ed
Page 49 and 50: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction Despi
Page 51 and 52: THE BEAT SCENE REVIEW SECTION Dexte
Page 53 and 54: Damn Fine Letters work but he reall
Page 55 and 56: Jack Kerouac The Haunted Life and O
Page 57 and 58: The Haunted Life talk on porches, l
Page 59 and 60: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn The Coll
Page 61 and 62: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn happens
Page 63: Diane di Prima having her long hair

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