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

The scattering of the Beats was both physical and figurative, and it was so highly charged for their poetics as well as their ethics because it represented a fall from a specific point of origin when proximity seemed absolute. This is the mythos of a Beat Eden, a prelapsarian state of communication falling into history's "dank truth," its innocent mutuality corrupted by serpents. Ginsberg in particular would look back to the intense conversational intimacies that brought the original Beat circle together in the New York of the mid-1940s and see in those shared confessional encounters a definition of Beat in direct opposition to the culture of Cold War America. Ginsberg was acutely aware of how current social and economic relations contradicted knowledge of sensual desire or spiritual camaraderie and deterred sharing such knowledge with others by defining it as unnatural, even insane. [5] The original Beat circle provided an alternative model that ran counter to those "systems of mass communication" where "th e most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed" (Ginsberg, "Poetry, Violence" 331). For Ginsberg, the Cold War was a conflict between mutually exclusive worlds of knowledge and communication. Offering communitas rather than containment, he too believed in a Vital Secret.

The tacit promise of the letter, therefore, was to extend those originally oral, intimate, and mutual confessions through a mode of writing inherently concerned with intimacy, orality, and mutuality. Significantly, when Ginsberg first mentioned "The Green Automobile," he promised to "tape recite and send" it to Cassady (As Ever 146): the "tapevoice" poetics of presence, analyzed by Michael Davidson (Ghostlier Demarcations 196-223) and featuring Beat writers, directly upgraded the technology of the letter-poem. What Ginsberg called the "hypocrisy of literature" (Interview with Thomas Clark 289) might be answered by the letter as the least hypocritical circuitry of textual communication.

How fitting, then, that Ginsberg's first publication should have been two letters to William Carlos Williams, and that they are explicitly concerned with communication itself. Writing against "the grey secrecy of time," he addresses his first letter "somewhat in the style of those courteous sages of yore who recognized one another across the generations as brotherly children of the muses" (Williams 204). Such brotherly recognition was especially important to Ginsberg but was hardly unique for poets at this time. The correspondence of Creeley and Olson, for example, began at exactly this point--Spring 1950--and flourished as a mutually supportive correspondence for writers who were also, as George Butterick observes, "cut off by indifference and entrenched interests, seeking to communicate from their respective foxholes" (xv). The importance of the epistolary for the Beats, as distinct from the Black Mountain poets, only makes sense in relation to their particular history as a uniquely intimate and isolated c ircle bound together by multiple marginalizations, committed to autobiographical and group mythologizing, and eventually dispersed over time and through space. A product of absence, the letter nonetheless symbolically and practically answered to desires for presence: for making present both a subjective logos--what Ginsberg called the "very spark of life" ("When the Mode" 329) and Kerouac called "the thing itself" (Letters 356)--and an intersubjective relation with another equally committed self. But in historical hindsight it is all too easy to invert Ginsberg's vision of Beat communion, to say that it is no more than a belated myth, only a fantasy of accessing what Jacques Lacan would call the impossible Real of desire: a dream of primal unity and plenitude manufactured in the medium and from the viewpoint of separation and loss.