To Allen Ginsberg

San Francisco                                                                                 Aug. 23, 1956

Allen-

Your letter and poetry came today, today, a day before I set my mind on

going away from this here San Francisco. Someone is driving to New Mexico, I

put my hi-fi set and records and books and other things in her car, and they are

still there. I will stay. If you say three weeks. I will stay. Reason for coming out

here was to see you and to experience first plane ride; experienced plane ride,

have yet to experience you. But I am not Sweetface Corso, but RATFACE Corso,

really. Perhaps second canto will squeak that I am. I have finished second canto,

and have no carbon. Chris MacLaine has second canto, when he gives it back I

will carbon it and send you. I met Peter and accept Peter and like Peter and

Lafcadio is or can be a Kirilov or a Barsorov — he has the face, and I preached to

him, told him, « Don’t do anything — be sixteen fifteen kill yourselt, be always

fifteen …  » He listened and maybe didn’t — his face looked like it heard at any

rate. Two weeks ago Peter gave me five dollars. Haven’t seen him since.

June 1955, after leaving Harvard, I met a beautiful Shelley with a cunt

with Anton and she dug me and gave me a place to live and has been with me

up till a month ago when I decided that I wanted to go to California. She went

back home and expects to join me soon. She sends me money and delightful

letters and I love her very much. Was she, who taught me. She has fantastic

memory, only nineteen, can recite and feel all of Shelley, yes all, Prometheus

(Unbound), Alastor, (The) Revolt of Islam, and also fifty stanzas of Swinburne’s

The Trump of Time — but more ! She is going to kill herself on her twentieth

year. She planned her death two years ago. The year that I lived with her was

all her … she’d lock herself in a room and would walk up and down up and

down… spoke to no one but her Gregory… weep, shed weep and weep…

I can’t really inform you about her, but I tell you she is the greatest person I’ve

ever met, and if ever you meet her, I doubt if you’d disagree. Her name is Hope

Savage, I call her Sura. Write to her: Hope Savage, [ . . . ] Camden, South

Carolina. She, Allen, is our Rimbaud and more today.

But haven’t you discovered Lucifer ? Why St. Francis ? Oh, I can see why

St. Francis, but why ? Is not Lucifer the first free thinker ? Is he not the emancipator

of worlds ? The eternal rebel ? Lucifer is love — St. Francis, gee-gaw.

And I will not wash Peter’s feet — no never! That is not saintly! I will, instead,

have him wash my feet and give me all he possesses in return for having me

stay a night or a year on his bed while he sleeps away from me far away on

the floor. And this he will do it he is a saint, but screw saints. One is almost

inclined to wash one’s own feet. Nor is the saint one who, old and peeling,

flashes his cancerous fingertips before the eyes of children squealing : « Cock

cock cock ». Children, almost invariably, would, like Rousseau, tease these old

men with a grand expose in some half dark, saints ain’t to be teased but

frankly I never knew what a saint had to be or could be for Gregory to say :

« Ah, a saint, »—or for someone to say: « Look, a saint. » And I reply : « Ah, yes”,

because his hands were dwarf-clawed, his face gnarled, and his back weighed

down with apple carcass. Kierkegaard would have replied : « A midget, yes — a

saint, no”. But fuck saints. I was once a saint and everybody said fuck me so

I’m going to say fuck me too — besides when I do see a saint I do not say :

« Look a saint ? » I say nothing because I SAW A SAINT, and it I saw a saint,

and I am Gregory, why should someone else see that saint when his name is :

Anyname.

Marlowe, in my intensity, comes closest to knowing Lucifer. Beautiful

Marlowe — fuck Shakespeare, Burroughs’ immortal bard, fuck him ! Marlowe is

God. Only God can make a Lucifer. And he’s made one that I accept and live

for and with and I will tell you : He is 1954-55 Gregory. He’s sucked clean of

enthusiasm. He’s fucked Wagner and has accepted Bach Chopin Vivaldi — and

no longer is Les Miserables his favorite prison book, but no book, or Unamuno

book or Turgenev book, in fact any book, all book . . . my favorite. He’s licked

off his « green armpit » of green and even arm, and writes with a clean tongue

but with a gut full of green arm, waiting to be excreted or puked. He is a dead

Gregory. A phony Gregory. But he was once a 1950-Gregory, a blind sick beautiful

Gregory. I’m up there with you Ginsberg, asshole dry, with my binoculars

… looking, and I don’t know what you’re looking for and I don’t know what

I’m looking for… but it’s great looking because nobody anymore says a John

Holmes to me or a Lucien [Carr] or a [Robert] Merims or a fucken stupid

idiotic nowhere Helen Parker who I broke down and put down and laughed

at having an orgasm as my revenge ! I was greater than any fucking thing she

could ever copy to think or say. And Merims was always and is a bad breath

smelling distraction. And Lucien, all right. And Kerouac, he’ll never be tubercular.

And [Alan] Ansen and Burroughs, I forgot their faces. And Keck I dreamed

I pounded his face over and over screaming: « You are the Moby Dick

in us all !  » But Keck wasn’t worth that dream. He, like Anton and the rest, are

Christ scabs, long since picked, examined (like a monkey who examines his

own shit with its head tilted guttering: « Ohhhh ahhhh gooooop »-swallowing

It). Fuck them too. But there’s Dusty [Moreland], and Dusty has been the

only true sorrow I’ve know other than Sura, and I love Dusty.

As soon as I hit San Francisco I met Ferling [Ferlinghetti] and he has twenty

of my books to sell and sold twelve, and I gave him copy of Way Out and

he didn’t know what to say or I didn’t stay long enough to listen. I met Neal

[Cassady], and Neal turned me on and ran. And I don’t like North Beach. And

1 told [Robert] LaVignel he is dead and he nodded his skull and agreed, but

for a dead man, like a dead Gregory, he can do.

I once said in a poem: « I have eaten flowers / and every flower I ever told

was a lie. » My only true poems are the ones you saw piled high on ISth Street

three years ago… they are all gone… lost… I lost them in 1953… in a

Greyhound bus terminal in Florida. I even met Jane again… two months ago

in Cambridge. She took me to her pad, undressed, undressed me, but no hard-

on. I laughed and she wept, and I laughed, and she left.

Siesta In Xbalba is almost as phony as my Way Out but not quite. You

believe your Siesta. And I will not go to see [Philip] Whalen, [Locke]

McCorkle, etc., because I do not believe in my Way Out, but I am nevertheless,

working on the third canto. And if I do see them I will tell them I am not

a phony and that I believe and that, please, they should believe in me. And they

will believe in me because I still have a young face and can smile just at the

right time. And DEAmont [Ruth Witt-Diamant] wants me to read, and I

can’t see myself getting up there assbare and reading. Poets should never

read, but shoot, fully clothed, Tommy gun in hand, and shoot.

In The Morgue like your Dream Record was also dream. And why hasn’t my

name every appeared in any of your poems? You goofed. I was once alive, and

you didn’t even record me. You recorder of shit. Record your Neals and your

Kerouacs and they’ll record you and you’ll record them… la-la-la the merry-

go-round, the fucking horses will never run away. They’re always there to ride

and record. I got off the wheel and ran away, and now were you to go back to

that merry-go-round you’d find the little Italian olive wild haired horse gone.

What is there to find out ? Has anyone record of his name, any bureau? I’m

laughing, so do not accept this bullshit, and I’m sure you aren’t, and I’m sure

you’re laughing. Good.

Archibald MacLeish tells me I have created a world of my own and that is

good after he read my book. I told him the world created me; not me it. When

I see you I’ll show you his letter. He’s a great white father, nothing else. Fuck

him. And if Rexroth is anything like McClure, fuck him too. I don’t like

these wedded homespun poets who ain’t. And [Henry] Miller is a shit because

he put down Moricand, poor Moricand, closest thing to Rimbaud that Miller

will ever meet. He, Miller, in Time Of Assassins bemoans the fact that he didn’t

meet Rimbaud in his youth, and now in his Devil In Paradise, retracts it. Just

like all them old fucks. Retractions retractions… who will you retract GINSBERG ?

Solomon ? Neal ? Kerouac ? Who ? When will you present

your Wilhelm Meister ?

I only scream because I think you have it, and having it, will for the love

of the learned elders of Zion, throw it away, and assume a quiet tea-tinkling-

cup air. Maybe not. But I can say it anyway. Angered and drunk, I told La Vigne

I did not like his lips. I like him and want to be his friend. I pulled down my

pants and said « Okay LaVigne fuck me. » It couldn’t happen. Now we will be

good friends, that done with. After that we went to Dearmonts [Diamant]

Ruth Witt. I fucked them all for two hours with beautiful lies. When I spoke

there was silence. I DEMANDED SILENCE, and got it. I was too drunk to

remember all. Perhaps Bob does.

I will wait here until you arrive. I am staying with Nicole Sanzenbach.

Write me as Gregory Sanzenbach for the love of an old landlady. Enjoy your

sunsets.

Gregory