Regarding On the Road, the Beats, and Cassady - photo 1

Regarding On the Road, the Beats, and Cassady

Lot 218
07.12.2022 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Sold
$ 50 400
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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Archive
ID 859737
Lot 218 | Regarding On the Road, the Beats, and Cassady
Estimate value
$ 8 000 – 12 000
KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Typed letter signed (“Jack”) to Ed White, [29 December 1950]. Unpublished.

Quarto. Single leaf; both sides; additional text running perpendicular in margin of verso; browned and brittle; lower margin lightly worn, with one or two chips and short tears running into bottommost lines of text on each side. With envelope addressed in autograph, postmarked Jamaica, New York.

“Isn’t it strange that Neal Cassady has become a very great man?”

Two packed pages mark the end of the first half of the twentieth century, and Jack’s letter opens with an elaborate greeting and salutation in French, continuing in Kerouacian English through a fond farewell, followed by a second full page of postscript. Jack recalled a night of carousing with White through the streets and subways, arriving at the Columbia dining hall for breakfast, and other past adventures, all in a single Proustian-length sentence. It was spontaneous prose, Jack’s natural gift.

He reports, “Suffice to say On the Road must, MUST be finished before May,” and follows with a dozen questions, searching for my input:

Now seriously...when you’ve got time to write back please – what would you like me to write? What kind of book would you like to see come from me at this time? What is happening in the world, and especially in America? Where are we going? What do you think of our generation? What think of death and change? What does a guy like me have to offer in the way of a book to a world in its present state? What is the vision in your heart of what I could do? It might bring out your own vision.

This landmark letter articulates the heart of Jack’s novel when he states, “a much greater man has arisen on my American horizon.” On the Road was not published until 1957, more than six years after this letter, but most of the story was already in Kerouac’s notes and memories – including the essential modern jazz of post-World War II New York, which embodied the new culture: “Along the lines of modern composition (Bartok, Schoenberg), I want to discover the basic tones of existence (as embodied in the character & the characters) and organize the variations.” He continues, “[F]urther, using jazz as a wise knowledge of the ‘IT’ of feeling, I want talk, talk, talk...16 bars, bridge, and take-out 8 bars, and if the talker is ‘blowing’ he can take another chorus, and if a whole group of people insists on silence, then this is an animated chorus of silence, a choral hymn, oratorio.”

He goes on to extol one of Cassady’s lengthy, legendary letters:

You’d never guess who it was; or if ever you believed my sincerity, even after I tell you of my base, base secret-eye – it’s that lad from Denver, a criminal reformed, a figure of such immense proportions now that his background sinks in the pool of his nature. After writing one other side of this page to you I this morning received a 23,000-word letter (!) from him in Frisco in which he poured his heart out about a girl… hotel rooms, tears and cocksucking, attempts at suicide, farcical scenes, poolrooms, hospitals, jails, Xmas Eve in Denver 1946 and the soul of a man. Miscarriage at St. Luke’s, dwarfish cabdrivers, a thousand things my poor talent can’t organize and tell of, inasmuch to as it’s been told by a much greater writer than I am.

Bestowing Cassady’s missive with the highest praise, he writes, “This letter, which is really a long novelette, to me ranks with the greatest writing ever done in America and modern Europe; it outmatches Céline, Wolfe; matches Dostoevsky in its highest moments; has all of Joyce at its command and so much more. Will Giroux look at it? [...] A genius has risen from your home- town.”

Kerouac also recognized that a new literary generation was being born and that it was “a moment of American Renaissance… because I’m convinced the day is coming in America when the maddest of geniuses will rise from the streets and the land with a language, and a vision all their own, eloquent, confessional, sublime and pure.” Although he never believed or acknowledged any connection with the new generation of the sixties, and resented the disruption of his private life by Beat teenagers, On the Road was for them an articulate source of inspiration.
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
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