On Neal Cassady's death - photo 1

On Neal Cassady's death

Lot 245
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 859765
Lot 245 | On Neal Cassady's death
Estimate value
$ 6 000 – 9 000
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”), 21 April 1968, with his Lowell, Massachusetts, telephone number in autograph to upper margin.

Quarto. Single leaf; recto only; tanned along creases and upper margin; light smudging; a couple autograph notations. With envelope addressed in type, postmarked Lowell, Massachusetts.

“I’m borrowing money from my publishers because all of sudden, in this crucial time of my life, the money has stopped cold: altho I thought Vanity of Duluoz, latest novel, would make a hit.”

Press reports of Neal Cassady’s bizarre death in Mexico were superficial, and although White was aware that Neal and Jack were no longer in touch, he turned to Kerouac for more substantial information. He wrote this reply in part:

Carolyn Cassady called me up collect from California in and around Feb. 4 (supposed date of Neal’s death) (my ma’s birthday) and told me he’d been found dead by a railroad track, in a T-shirt, in the rain, in San Miguel, south of Mexico City. But Neal’s girlfriend had “refused” to mail his ashes to the widow Carolyn. So I asked Carolyn to check with the local consulate and confirm death if any. No answer. It may be just a trick to get welfare payments for Carolyn while he runs around with said girlfriend. I hope so. His buddy Ken Kesey pulled the same stunt, if you’ll remember, or if you didn’t know, a few years ago, leaving his writing-bus parked over a cliff at Big Sur, with a suicide note in his typewriter, and the cops found nothing in the surf below and presumed he was washed to sea or eaten by sharks. But Kesey turned up in Mexico a year later.

Ginsberg had noted that no one had seen a body. Jack was hurt by articles suggesting that he, by making Neal the model for Dean Moriarty, had burdened him with an image he could not live up to. “All he has to do is grow a beard and wear beads and go to Madrid,” Kerouac added, sardonically. He had no respect for the hippie decade.

The rest of the letter is an update on the current, and final, phase of his life: he and Mémère were moving from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Florida. His latest novel, Vanity of Duluoz, has not been the hit he had hoped it would be. And yet he ends his missive optimistically: “Thank God America still has a literature otherwise everything would read like Romney, Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy, McCarthy, Humphrey B.S.”
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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