Modern spontaneous prose, Fleming, and more - photo 1

Modern spontaneous prose, Fleming, and more

Starting price
$ 5 500
Auction dateClassic
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -04:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
USA, New York
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 859761
Lot 242 | Modern spontaneous prose, Fleming, and more
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969).Typed letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, 1 March 1965. Unpublished.

Quarto. Single leaf; recto only; autograph postscript providing Kerouac’s “secret address,” red ink. With
autograph address to verso of letter visible through cellophane panel in envelope, postmarked Saint Petersburg, Florida.

"To think that all that crazy stuff I’ve written since 1951 in a way started when you casually suggested, in Chinese restaurant on Amsterdam and 124th, remember? to try ‘sketching,’ which I did, and it led to discovery of modern spontaneous prose.”

A roving letter as of yore, full of news, reflections, and rapid conversational text, as though he and White were catching up at a happy reunion after a long absence. He reports that Desolation Angels is coming out in May, and harking back to a previous conversation about his perhaps returning to “careful ‘Johnsonian’ sentences,” he explains why it won’t work: “When I do it just doesn’t EXPRESS the swirl of things as they are in this swirling age.” He complains about current tastes in literature, writing that “everyone’s interested in Ian Fleming’s newfangled GUNS and cars that spit and all such childish shit and only five years after a beat generation handed them a poetry renaissance on a platter [...] As Hegel says, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The synthesis wont come till late 1970s, by which time we’ll all be too pooped to care.”

“As for the cabin plans,” he writes, “that dream is further away then when I saw you, I only earned $5000 last year but things may change in the future, in fact oughta.”
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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23.11.2022 – 07.12.2022
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