Kerouac
Sir: Most of Andrew Brown's lucid account of Gerald Nicosia's biography of Jack Kerouac (27 July) cannot be faulted, but he makes a couple of false assumptions in passing. He states that Kerouac 'seems never to have had any intellectual friendship with a woman'. In Minor Char- acters, the memoir of her years with the novelist (which I reviewed in the Spectator, 9 February), Joyce Johnson records in eloquent detail how very considerately and effectively he helped her as a beginning writer. Insofar as Kerouac was intellectual at all, this friendship was clearly (among other things) as intellectual as many he had with men.
Brown writes that Ginsberg 'actually carried out the programme of unrevised spontaneity that Kerouac tried to advo- cate' and that 'reading his collected poems you can see what a very bad idea this was'. This is no place to debate the latter opinion, but anyone comparing the mas- sive Ginsberg Collected with previous edi- tions will soon find that in fact the poet has made many revisions to his own work over the decades — as did Kerouac to his. It's in Kerouac's case, however, not Ginsberg's, that the alterations were imposed by edi- tors and publishers rather than the author's discretion. Both writers tended to feel with
Blake that 'He who does not know Truth at sight is unworthy of her notice.' If neither achieved results as convincing as those of their visionary mentor, well — who has?
Michael Horovitz
Piedmont, Bisley, Stroud, Gloucestershire
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