On Edie Parker, American families, and friendship - photo 1

On Edie Parker, American families, and friendship

Lot 198
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
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$ 8 190
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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ID 859717
Lot 198 | On Edie Parker, American families, and friendship
Estimate value
$ 6 000 – 9 000
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Autograph letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, 17 September 1947, postmarked Marin County, California.

Octavo. Four leaves of onion skin; rectos of first three and recto and partial verso of final; creased; pencil.

"Edie is the only thing in the world I have left to figure out. Everything else is charmingly clear and also charmingly paradoxical—but my comprehension of [her] is stormy, unwilling, and, also, insane.”

Ed White corresponded with Jack during his stay in Marin County, California in 1947, although his side of the correspondence from this period apparently did not survive (the rest is in the Berg Collection at New York Public Library). White planned to return to New York by train for his senior year at Columbia, a journey which was to include a visit to a wartime girlfriend in Dearborn, Michigan. Jack seizes the opportunity to ask him to look up his ex-wife Edie Parker—“You must at all costs be clever, so that you will be able to give me an interesting report on her”—who’d been a model in New York and now lived in Grosse Pointe.

Kerouac and Edie Parker were married on August 22, 1944, in a Bronx Municipal Building with two detectives as their witnesses. Kerouac had been held in the city jail as a material witness in the Kammerer homicide case and promising Mrs. Parker that he would wed her daughter was the only way of getting the money he needed to make bail. To repay his debt to his wealthy mother-in-law, Jack soon took a job in a Detroit factory as a ball-bearings inspector, but quickly grew tired of the routine. Their marriage was annulled in 1946. Parker was fictionalized in The Town and the City as Judie Smith.

Edie would meet with Ed for an hour or so on a sunny afternoon, complaining that Jack and his friends had talked all the time and never worked. She worked, she said determinedly. White later reflected that he felt he knew Jack better after the meeting, and that it was a lucky chance for him to see and hear Edie in person. They would not meet again until the 25th anniversary celebration of On the Road, held in Boulder in 1982. By the time of that gathering Edie, perhaps inspired by Jack’s posthumous fame, had capitulated at last and was now Edie Kerouac Parker. She had the infamous Herbert Huncke with her, and a Catholic priest who was to be a cohort on a book she was planning about her life with Kerouac. She told a crowd of curious Kerouac disciples that the Beat life she saw was not what they imagined. “That’s bullshit!” she exclaimed, countering some assertion. “All they ever did was sit around and talk!”

In the present letter, after covering Edie and others, and reflecting on his friendship with White—“[Y]ou and I are very honest with one another, and that’s a strange thing”—this lengthy letter waxes philosophical on the state of American families and industry. He writes in part: “‘The honest American families are disappearing too fast,’ my father always said, a little dogmatically and with Peglerian undertones, really, but in a specially important way, true. Morally there’s nothing you or I can say, but emotionally, for me, and aesthetically also, I like the old American types, like your father, best.” He closes his letter, “But this is all too much for me right now. SIGNING OFF / Jack.”

And on the verso of the last page is his urgent postscript:

P.S.! Important!
Get me a ticket for the Penn-Columbia game! I’ll reimburse you, handsomely.

SCALPED AGAIN
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
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