On writing, with mention of On the Road - photo 1

On writing, with mention of On the Road

Starting price
$ 6 500
Auction dateClassic
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -04:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
USA, New York
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Archive
ID 859721
Lot 202 | On writing, with mention of On the Road
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, 15 January 1949. Unpublished.

Quarto. Two leaves; rectos only; browned and brittle; a few small tears to margin, not affecting text. With envelope addressed in type, postmarked Jamaica, New York.

"And the other book is the On the Road idea... I’ll get a new title for it like The Hipsters or The Gone Ones or The Furtives, or perhaps even The Illegals. A study of the new Neal-like generation of honkytonk nights.”

The Paris trip is still a priority Kerouac's letters to White – their “beautiful correspondence,” as he termed it. Jack explains how family circumstances will keep him away at first, but he remains somewhat hopeful about joining everyone later: “I’d love to go to Paris, and work that farm, and go to China, and screw every woman in the world, and write books, and do everything I want to do at the same time – but of course I can’t. I had to make my choice. But there’s no reason why I might not be able to make it next summer, and depending on how long you’ll stay in Paris – etc. – we might make it there after all.” Jack predicts a good time during White's impending visit to the East Coast: “Things are really jumping in New York now. You’ll be just in time.”

Jack reports that The Town and the City has been rejected by Little, Brown, and is on submission to Harcourt Brace. He writes that Dr. Sax; the Myth of the Rainy Night is “next on the agenda.” And regarding On the Road: “When you get to Paris ask Allan Temko to show you the long literary letter I wrote him about it... A study of the Hunkies and the Neals and the Louannes. I’ve got 35,000-words of that.”

In an introspective closing paragraph he reflects,

I can either be like Neal and be savage [...]; or I can curb that for sweeter things, sweeter intentions, sweeter thoughts, greater life. Words don’t work. It’s not that one has to be philosophical [...]; but beyond that, simply that one can take his choice and enjoy the freedom of the will. I feel great peace. I’ll miss the gutters of Paris, the sidewalks where Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and Wolfe walked; [...] I’ll miss all...and always do...but beyond mere happiness there is mere, dear joy, gladness, being here or there or everywhere and jumping in the air.
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