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236 Chapter 14 the rising tide of fAme I think of you and wonder where you are, and all the others. . . . I see no one. I begin this week to write a new novel, one that I want to write quicker, purer, even though the world has turned around. I thought of you in Shreveport where the oil men stand around in the noon sun with their hats tipped over their eyes, smoking without touching their cigarettes and shifting from foot to foot. And again in the red clay, piney hills, where the paintless cabins stand in the middle of worn out cotton fields where the cypress trees come black and ugly and weird out of the creeks and bayous; and once more when we came back through Vicksburg in heavy midnight, and pressed our noses against the window to see the little red lights on the bluffs, hanging in the huge dark. And other places, and other times. I know, Jack, about the rough words, and the wild prides, and all that. We are the same. It doesn’t matter. We are all older now, and I’ve been crazy several times this year, or I know very close. And, more and more, I feel there is something awesome and natural to the fact that so many things and people are dispersed. I used to believe in my time, as you may remember. I was a young Werther about it, I am sure. But so was everyone once. —JOHN CLeLLON HOLMeS, letter to Jack Kerouac, August 11, 1955 During the next four years, Holmes struggled against a steady erosion of his emotional reserves as he realized that he couldn’t live on what he was earning as a writer. The shadow of financial catastrophe continually hung over him. Yet the first few times Kerouac saw him after the publication of Go, he managed to give the impression that he was doing well. In late September 1953 they met unexpectedly when John and Shirley visited Ginsberg in his new apartment on the Lower east Side. It was the the risingtide of faMe 237 first time Holmes met Burroughs. Burroughs’ first book, Junky, had been published in April 1953 by Ace Books. He was staying with Ginsberg while he assembled his notes for another drug book for A. A. Wynn, The Yage Letters, about his travels in South America in search of yage, a hallucinogenic plant. Holmes hadn’t seen any of the old crowd in over a year, and it was the first time he had brought Shirley, who had just become his wife. They had been married for only two weeks, but it was six months later before Holmes managed to separate himself from his unfinished novel long enough to write a letter to Landesman describing the simple ceremony. The evening in Ginsberg’s dim, red-bulb-lit living room was strained and confused. Kerouac was tormented over his suspicions that Gregory Corso was moving in on the young woman Alene Lee, with whom Kerouac was having an affair that summer. She typed up the first collaged manuscript of The Yage Letters. A month later, in October 1953, after breaking off with Lee, Kerouac sat in his mother’s kitchen in Richmond Hill and wrote a chaotic account of the affair, titled The Subterraneans, in three Benzedrinedriven nights. His portrayal of Holmes in the book was both unforgettable and unflattering. Unlike the brief glimpses Kerouac presented of most of the “subterraneans” in his crowd, he spent an entire page on Holmes. The negative depiction of Holmes stemmed from Kerouac’s conflicted feelings about Holmes’ success, veering between his uneasy resentment of Holmes as a literary rival and his lasting memory of their old friendship. Holmes’ pseudonym in the book—always a clue to Kerouac’s intentions— was “Balliol MacJones,” a sly dig at Holmes’ distinguished family name. In the opening pages Kerouac hovered between descriptions of Holmes that were usually negative, but often still admiring. He credited Holmes with having been one of their crowd who shared not only a literary response to their new attitudes in naming Whitman, Thoreau, and Melville as their predecessors, but also a consciousness of the deeper meanings of their experience . In the book he wrote that Holmes understood the mystery, the silence of the subterraneans, “urban Thoreaus” Mac[Jones] called them, as from Alfred Kazin in New York New School lectures back East commenting on all students being interested in Whitman from a...

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