Beschreibung
SIGNED LETTER FROM KEROUAC FEATURING RARE DRAWING AND DISCUSSIONS OF FELLOW WRITERS. Dating from the final decade of Kerouac's life, the present letter is an unpublished insight into how the writer's relationships, attitudes and motivations developed in his later years. On the back of the second leaf is a collection of abstracted forms to which he refers at the start of the letter. Kerouac ironically describes his artwork as a gift "worth 10,000 dollars within 5 years". Identifying the piece, completed in pencil and marker, as an oil painting, he further comments on its value and rarity arising from the probability that he will "suddenly get bored with paint again". Subsequently, Kerouac describes an original piano composition titled "Procession of the Iroquois Chieftain" which-though left un-scored, "'cause I dont know how"-he claims to have recorded on tape. Charting his creative impulses, with increasing proficiency, from visual art to musical composition to narrative drama, he journeys to and from thematic fragments in a letter which was ultimately unsent to its intended recipient, Philip Whalen. The very fragmented nature of this letter, however, gestures towards his waning capabilities to produce the long, stream-of-consciousness prose which garnered him acclaim with his masterpiece On the Road. Whalen, a California-based Zen Buddhist poet, appears to have maintained a stable relationship with Kerouac into the 1960s-relative at least to their fellow Beat-Generation authors named in the letter: Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Albert Saijo, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Contemplating the relationship between sentience and Buddhist enlightenment, Kerouac takes particular aim at Snyder, who "cant enlighten any sentient being because he is not sentient yet". More amiable though equally scrutinising is his evaluation of Ginsberg: "Ginsberg is not a sentient being who delights in sentient being, tho he IS a sentient being, however he wished to be Satan, having missed that, now desires Immortality as a Guru." Such comments along with the scattered, colloquial character of the letter temper any genuine criticism of the authors, and possibly reflect a state of insecurity. In an earlier letter addressed to Whalen, Kerouac describes his feeling of loneliness: "I don't even have a phone, or know where Allen is, or what Gary thinks of me, or Creel, or you for that matter" (Kerouac, 14 January 1963; in Letters, p. 355). Between enigmatic allusions to John F. Kennedy and the Library of Congress in the present letter, there lies a profound signal of Kerouac's inner concern for his reputation among peers-with the recently published Visions of Gerard, mentioned in the first annotation, receiving poor notices-and reconciliation with his popular reception as a "King of the Beats" (Schmidt). Among the chaotic literal and figurative scribbling, the letter's inherent value as an exploration of Kerouac's psyche is complemented by how it captures elements of his future literary output. A clear intent for his next foray into semi-autobiography is attested by the lines: "Now I am going to write a long dull novel about me and my father and my young days as handsome football player, merchant seaman, cunthound, butch make and leaf-of-grass-in-the-mouth aboriginal poet of Lowell and New York and the North Pole (where we went on 1942 ship in wartime)." Gesturing to a less fictionalised account, this paragraph captures the sentiments behind the work that would become Vanity of Duluoz. The at-times incoherent letter also, perhaps too realistically, presages Kerouac's 1965 piece Satori in Paris, a "lamentably poor piece of writing," in biographer Barry Miles' words, which was "obviously written in an alcoholic haze." (Miles, p. 337). The present letter is marked by previous owner John Sampas as unsent, casting Kerouac's aversion to time-consuming letter writing, which he details in the final. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 2513
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