Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, and the Political Economy of Beat Letters - Allen Ginsberg - Jack Kerouac - Neal Cassady - Brief Article

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2000 by Oliver Harris

Since Ginsberg tells Cassady that he is the "chief character" in the poem, it might be assumed that "The Green Automobile" escapes the internalized disciplinary limits on desire by virtue of the intimacy between the two men mediated by the letter. In a sense, this is indeed the case: in the following letter Ginsberg encloses "a writ copy of the as yet unfinished GREEN AUTOMOBILE, which shows you that though this letter is late I've been writing it, in other forms" (153). That resonant final phrasing measures Ginsberg's identification of letter and literature, hinting at the reciprocal economy that makes of letters poems and of poems letters. Undoing New Critical orthodoxies, it would elide the distinction between the poem as publishable and public property--destined for such august journals as the Kenyon Review--and a written personal communication, one governed by the key economics of the letter: the desire for exchange and the specificity of the reader (Altman 112). By aligning the desire for exchange with the exchange of desire, Ginsberg might, then, construct a countereconomy of writing, one that escapes the very formal economic and professional systems from which he and his fellow Beats were excluded.

The Beats' autobiographical impulse of self-expression therefore coincided with and was sustained by the epistolary dynamic of close communication. And as a mundane practice, the letter was a natural medium for writers committed to the representative value of the commonplace: a near-universal form of personal communication through which to recognize how the universal is communicated by the personal. But in the age of mass media such practices become archaic, anachronisms informed by a certain nostalgia: Ginsberg and Kerouac knew they were resurrecting a philosophy and practice from the era of Emerson, who also dreamed of an epistolary "colloquy sublime" and for whom, as Decker observes, "the eternal is ever to be grasped in the common quotidian detail typically recorded in letters" (122). The tense of everyday experience typically consecrated by the Beats is, significantly, the lost past rather than the immediate present.

Ginsberg's letter to Cassady enclosing "The Green Automobile" is not just "late" but three months late--it is now September 1953--and Ginsberg is apologizing not so much for a failure to reply speedily as for a virtual collapse in their epistolary relationship, or rather for a crisis in correspondence that exposes their relationship to be, precisely, virtual. This exposure of a fantasmic, and specifically epistolary; virtuality underwrites the poem from first stanza to last:

If I had a Green Automobile

I'd go find my old companion

in his house on the Western ocean.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

and back

to my visions, my office

and eastern apartment

I'll return to New York (Collected Poems 83-87)

What is going on here becomes clearer as Ginsberg's letter continues: "The point of this poem is to rewrite history, so to speak, make up a legend of my poor sad summer with you, and try to create some recognizable human-angelic ideal, ideal story, too" (As Ever 153). Legend--that which is readable as well as mythic--substitutes for reality; an aestheticized, paper triumph compensates for the actuality of a failed, bodily relationship. This is less a Whitmanesque eulogy for "homoerotic comradeship and visionary partnership" (Stephenson 161) than an epistolary fiction.