Recordings on Cassette Tapes with Holograph Notes

Dripping wet, Nina answered the phone:

‘If I talk, I’ll be chilled to the bone!

Speak not about jewelry,

Or other tomfoolery –

When I’m dressed give me diamonds on loan!’

Poor Har heard the sniffling Nina,

(With thoughts of la forma divina)

‘O.K. – diamonds come later –

But, in place of your pater

Will you pick out the menu for dinner?’”

The audio recordings include a discussion of the words “Angry Fix” mentioning alternates like fierce and furious. Eorsi says, “I should take ‘angry’ in the original meaning…” Ginsberg explains that for the (heroin) junkie it is probably an ‘irritable fix.’ Later, Ginsberg, referring to a biography, states, “I was kicked out of Columbia for writing on the window pane, ‘Fuck the Jews, [Columbia President] Nicholas Murray Butler has no balls, and then a cock and balls on the window pane, and a skull and crossbones.’ I was trying to get the cleaning lady to wash the window, instead, she reported me to the dean.”

After befriending Beat icons Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassidy while attending Columbia University, Ginsberg followed Cassidy to San Francisco and erupted onto the scene with his now legendary reading and 1955 publication of Howl, a long prose poem in the tradition of Kerouac. Ginsberg became one of America’s best-known contemporary poets due in part to his prolific output in diverse media. In 1961, he published a poem about his mother’s mental illness and death entitled Kaddish, generally regarded as his finest work. Thematically, though written several decades later and published in 1985, White Shroud serves as an epilogue to Kaddish. In addition to his own work, Ginsberg influenced America’s literary landscape as a creative writing teacher at several universities and co-founding a summer writing institute, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Boulder, Colorado’s Buddhist Naropa University. Ginsberg’s poetry and political activism in the US and abroad made him one of America’s most celebrated counterculture representatives.

In his youth, Eörsi supported the Russian Communist rule of his native Hungary but he was later jailed for writing ideological poetry that helped incite the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After his release from prison, Eörsi was banned from publishing his own work and turned, instead, to translating Goethe, Brecht, Shelley, Keats, Lorca, and Ginsberg.

The white box is bent with some tears and wear. Normal creasing and wear to manuscript page, photocopies and envelope, which is torn across the return address. An unusual lot of possibly unpublished conversations.