On making positive changes

Lot 226
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Starting price
$ 4 000
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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ID 859745
Lot 226 | On making positive changes
Estimate value
$ 5 000 – 8 000
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, [15] August [1954.] Unpublished.

Octavo. Bifoliate leaf, two pages covered; autograph note added in margin; partial fingerprint, ink, to lower right corner. With envelope addressed in type, postmarked Jamaica, New York.

“I aint afraid of death any more either.”

“Something terrific happening to me,” Jack writes in this apostrophe-free summer letter. “Buddha led me on to further happy discoveries that I'll tell you about come fall.” He had stopped drinking, at the VA doctors’ urging,

[A]nd boy do I feel good… strong all over, and mainly, glad. [...] aint got no money, intend to be a good tao bum and have no affairs… Tho this doesnt prevent me from wanting with all my excited happiness to be in denver this summer with you and bev and everybody and lay around the cherry blossom lawn in the after noons, but i have no money and i’m working hard on sixteen thousand different projects. so i ll see ya this fall anyway, ok?

His recurring dream of Hal was a warm, scholarly vision from college days. Jack reports that New World Writing has taken his jazz stories (but noting that he plans to change his writing name), and leaves me with a quotation from Tao XX, “The World and I,” to explain “something terrific” that was happening to him.
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