On Cassady, driving, and other topics - photo 1

On Cassady, driving, and other topics

Lot 219
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Starting price
$ 4 800
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 859738
Lot 219 | On Cassady, driving, and other topics
Estimate value
$ 6 000 – 9 000
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”), 2 March 2 1951. Unpublished.

Quarto. Single leaf of onion skin; recto only; autograph annotation above date – “Anniversary of publication of Town & City.” With envelope addressed in type, lightly stained, postmarked Jamaica, New York.

"[A]nd if I ever make decent money [...] I’m buying a house and raising my children there till conditions are better in this greedy country.”

A note at the top of this letter refers to the death of journalist Lee Casey. Jack’s 1950 trip to Denver had included a party hosted by socialite Greta Hilb, at which Jack had had a deep conversation with Hilb and Casey, who had been an influential though surly columnist for the Rocky Mountain News. Casey was a crusader who worked for better treatment and facilities for prisoners in the Colorado penal system, but was popularly known for his argumentative and militant disposition. Jack remembered him with interest and respect, and was saddened by his demise.

Nobody loved driving more than Kerouac, and his American dream depended on the excitement of highways. Here he refers to “a crackup in Vermont when I was 17, when I was a hotrod driver of the first order, and haven’t been able to drive properly since.” He was a happy passenger instead, digging jazz on the car radio and talking excitedly on an endless range of subjects, including driving. Later in the letter Jack, as was his wont, begins to revise his previously expressed overwhelming excitement about Neal: “I was over-enthusiastic but not entirely inaccurate about Neal’s abilities as a writer of originality and power; it’s just that he won’t keep it up, and his latest communiqué asserts: ‘I can’t talk, I can’t write, I can’t do anything but dream anymore.’” After recounting Cassady’s reading of the Christian martyrs, Jack’s final assessment is summed up in two words: “Weird guy.”
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
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