On a recently finished story, including an excerpt - photo 1

On a recently finished story, including an excerpt

Lot 215
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Starting price
$ 6 500
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 859734
Lot 215 | On a recently finished story, including an excerpt
Estimate value
$ 8 000 – 12 000
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, 23 September [1950], with an excerpt of a new story.

Octavo. Single leaf; both sides; with a couple autograph emendations and postscript. With envelope addressed in type, postmarked Jamaica, New York.

An update from Jack on Beverly’s ongoing visit. He relates an evening with Tom Livornese and a mad ride through Brooklyn in search of “a certain field, an Elitch field, with its fronds waving under the noses of passers-by on a busy street.” Characteristically, after a night in the city Jack feels “gloomy and inappropriate for life.” “Sometimes,” he writes, “I feel fascinated by this pit of night we live in, sometimes I have no energy to be fascinated at all.”

He also writes about the story he had just finished:

I finished it at nine o’clock Friday morning. When I woke, in the evening I was exhausted and felt as though I had no blood in my system – I was really pale, and listless, and a little sick. Here is a representative paragraph to show you what it’s like. A woman has been standing on a dark bridge with her shoes in her hand, contemplating the waters. The “good heart,” a simple hearted mute, who shines shoes on his knees for other men to make his living, comes and stands by her silently.

He includes a lengthy excerpt and closes:

Eventually he persuades her to love and live as he does. It is a good, Christian story, and I’m getting away from the style-absorptions again, for rougher rivers that suffer me to cross now. Well well, end of sheet.

Bev will leave Monday.

Your boy Jack
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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