Cleaning Up With William S. Burroughs And Mata Hari's Knickers

by Alastair Johnston

Mata Hari (nee M'greet MacLeod, 1876-1915),
caught with her pants down, as usual

     Martin Stone has a knack for finding great literary association items. The legendary British rock guitarist (Savoy Brown, Chilli Willi & the Red Hot Peppers, Pink Fairies, Wreckless Eric) was celebrated in a memoir by Peter Howard, Martin Stone, Bookscout, and immortalized in Iain Sinclair's novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and he is still on the search. Peter Howard, in his fond reminiscence, recalls Stone tracking down T. E. Lawrence's driver's license (though he was not able to acquire it). Finding it was not as significant as having the imagination to look for it, says Howard. (Lawrence died in a motorcycle wreck in 1935, presumably with his license in his wallet.)

     (Further aside: Mentioning the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I always recall a bit by the great British satirist Alan Bennett: "Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas, he was mistaken... No one who knew T. E. Lawrence as I did, scarcely at all, could fail but to be deeply impressed by him. I went down to Clouds Hill to visit Lawrence, or "Tee Hee" as he was known at school, and knocked at the door of the rose-covered cottage. The door was opened by a small, rather unprepossessing figure, slight of frame, fair-haired and with the ruddy gleaming face of a schoolboy. -- It was a schoolboy: I had come to the wrong house...").

     Recently on Facebook, Stone mentioned he had bought Mata Hari's knickers formerly held in the Black Museum in Paris. Mata Hari, the famous spy who was executed by a French firing squad in 1917, was perhaps better known for not wearing her knickers. (They have a Clousseau-like provenance: A retiring inspector of police asked for them as a going-away present during WWII; his son inherited them, didn't want them, and sold them to an antique dealer in Versailles. Now who would not want Mata Hari's knickers?) Stone did not reveal the price nor how much he made on the sale other than to say when he was younger he could have bought a nice house from the proceeds.

Martin Stone, bookscout, on the scent of some rare knickers.

(Picture tweeted by AnyAmount of Books, 

Mais oui, c'est un Office Depot à Paris).

     In his essay "A Blockhead's Bookshelf" (collected in William Targ's Carousel for Bibliophiles [New York, 1947]), Walter Blumenthal says "you cannot hope to own a copy of Paradise Lost bound in the apple tree that proved Adam's undoing," but he does cite a Shakespeare bound in the tree featured in The Merry Wives of Windsor and other similar "association" items. These range from fanciful to preposterous, but imagination can conjur up some wonderful association items and, like our hero Martin Stone, imagining them can lead to discovery. Think of an I.O.U. from Godwin to Shelley, a ticket to see the World in Miniature issued to J. Swift, a map of the Hebrides marked up by Dr Johnson, a prescription for clap medicine made out to James Boswell, a laudanum prescription made out to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The riverboat pilot's license of Sam Clemens. Put but your fancy in it.

Literary association item, awaiting authentication

     Fill the blank with the object of your desire. What do you collect? What do you crave? Seek and ye shall find. Somewhere there must exist a fair copy of Byron's autobiography, the original of which was burned in the offices of John Murray by Tommy Moore, "Hobby-O" Hobhouse and other craven cowards. Perhaps the scandalous tell-all autobiography, if a copy exists, is buried in some family archive in the attic of a stately home. I met a financier in New York who has Byron's Greek passport.

     There must be a name for non-literary artifacts with literary associations. Disjecta literaria? I have a paper plate used as a fan by Philip Whalen at a party, so inscribed by the poet in his elegant calligraphy. He would have thought of it as a goof, not a piece of literary history. It was a piece of trash, but Phil's comment ennobles it somewhat humorously.

Paper plate with food stains, inscribed by Philip Whalen 
(Dixie Paper Co., 9" picnic plate, Minden, Louisiana, ca. 1978)

       So how does one evaluate such things? People collect them for their literary association though they have no intrinsic literary value. Here's a case in point. The Pacific Book Auction Galleries in San Francisco have a sale coming up on October 10 of "Beats, Counterculture and the Avant Garde." It comprises 200 lots collected by Richard Synchef over the last 40 years or so. He seems to have been particular keen on getting authors to sign and inscribe works. He owned a copy of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test signed by 40 members of the counterculture: Diggers, poets, artists, Grateful dead roadies, etc. Now it can be yours for about ten grand. Some of the figures in his collection, such as McClure and Snyder, are alive so their signatures can still be had. (Just last weekend Snyder was signing broadsides at the Watershed Festival in Berkeley.) But the Big Guns of Beat, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Burroughs have gone to their eternal rest.

      Some of Synchef's acquisitions border on fetishism. He has a check from Jack Kerouac to the IRS (dated December 1963) for $300, now worth an estimated $1000 to $1500. Then there's Neal Cassady's Letters from Prison (New York, Blast Book, 1993) signed by Carolyn Cassady and her 3 children, the recipients of the letters. "Rick, good to see you at the Beat Museum. Keep the Beat!" "Hey Rick - you flatterer! Best, Carolyn Cassady" and "It's too much! Jami Cassady." This brings up some strange visions of "The Beat Museum" and a desperate autograph seeker; maybe Neal Cassady himself was in a glass case there (Estimated $400 to $600). The strangest item of all, perhaps, is the shopping list of William Burroughs (1914-97).

rubbing alcohol, Lysol, honey, milk -- boil, then inject?

     While Burroughs is by far the most interesting of the so-called "Beat" writers, how valuable can this shopping list be? Dated circa 1989 it is estimated to sell for $500 to $800. It is a curiosity, containing "Small garbage bags," "Cat pans" (or is that cats paw?!), "rubbing alcohol" and "Lysol," as well as "Castille soap (the kind that makes water softer)". We get the sense Burroughs was a bit of a clean freak. Then there's "Saltines" and "Gravy" (amended in manuscript to "Brown gravy"): pretty sad dietary items. A second hand has added "Bic 'good news' razors (10-pak)" and "gourmet vinegar - white balsamic." Are biographers going to make bank with this, like the discovery that Abe Lincoln grew up eating pork ribs? I met Burroughs a few times and somewhere have letters from him.

     In one he thanks me for sending him a Victorian pamphlet on the Cure for the Opium Habit. Now there's a useful piece of his writing (if I can find it). I always thought it would be amusing one day to tell my grand daughter that I did drugs with Burroughs (when she is older and will not be shocked). I imagine Old Bill got fairly sick of young cocks like me showing up with their sad stash and offering to get him high. He never seemed fazed by any of it though. But now any piece of him seems to have intrinsic value, even a shopping list. Who would want this scrap enough to pay hundreds of dollars for it? You could apply the Cut-Up technique to it, but you'd still have a banal piece of waste paper.
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Corrections: The Kerouac check and Burroughs shopping list were not part of Mr. Synchef's collection. Those items were added to the auction by PBA Galleries to round-out the sale. Additionally, the copy of Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was signed by only one of the Grateful Dead's roadies.
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Of Related Interest:

Beware of Hart Crane's Sombrero.

Ernest Hemingway's Typewriter Comes To Auction.
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Historic Collection Of Kerouac Letters Offered At $1,250,000

by Stephen J. Gertz

From "Old Sam Kerouac."

"To think that all that crazy stuff I’ve written 
since 1951 in a way started when you casually suggested, in Chinese restaurant on Amsterdam and 124th, remember? to try “sketching,” which I did, and it led to discovery of modern spontaneous prose" (March 1, 1965).

A highly significant and awe-inspiring archive of sixty-three intimate letters written 1947-1969 by Beat novelist and author of On the Road, Jack Kerouac, to his close friend, Edward White of Denver, Colorado, whom he met in 1946 in New York as a fellow Columbia University undergraduate and who inspired Kerouac's prose-style, has come into the marketplace. Mostly unpublished and seen for the first time, the letters, typed and autograph with some postcards, are being offered by Glenn Horowitz, Bookseller, of New York City.

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“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.”
(January 15, 1949).

                                   __________                                  

"The White collection is probably the last foundational Kerouac correspondence that will appear in the market," Horowitz told Booktryst.  It is being tendered en bloc for $1,250,000.

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“Well, boy, guess what?
 I sold my novel to 
Harcourt Brace – 
(after one rejection from Little, Brown) 
– and got a $1,000 advance. 
Mad? – I tell you it’s mad. 
Mad? – me mad? Heh heh heh.”
(March 29, 1949, re: The Town and the City)

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New York Times reporter, former editor-in-chief of Details, and original columnist at Spin magazine. John Leland, author of 2007's Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of 'On the Road' (They're Not What You Think), has provided a lengthy and insightful Introduction to the collection's catalogue.

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“While all this is happening my star is rising,
and it’s an awful feeling.”
(April 29, 1949)
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He writes:

"The two exchanged at least 87 letters and postcards, starting in July 1947 – the month that began Kerouac’s travels in On the Road – and continuing until August 1969, two months before Kerouac’s death at age 47. Over the course of this correspondence their relationship evolves and contradicts itself, as friendships do, in response to the needs pressing on the two men. What they shared was the male restlessness and self-exploration of the postwar years, along with a love of literature and their own fundamental questions: What sort of men did they want to become – what model of lovers or patriarchs, with what voices to convey their visions, their art. 

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"And in this letter you’ll see all the wild thoughts
of a buddy 3,000 miles away who sits in his room
at midnight, madly drinking coffee and smoking,
typing away faster than he can think.

"And don’t I love to talk about myself.
What a gigantic loneliness this all is."
(May 9, 1949)
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"Since Kerouac didn’t like the telephone, and since the two men were often in different places, their letters provided a lasting stage on which to try out their future personae. White pursued painting, literature, and teaching before ultimately settling on architecture; Kerouac continued to search for the voice that best captured the life in his head. Each played a part in the other’s search."

Ed White was fictionalized as "Tim Gray" in On the Road.

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“I’ve written 86,000 words 
almost finishing On The Road...”
(April 20, 1951)
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You need a glossary to identify the parade of people Kerouac mentions within the correspondence, some obvious - William Burroughs, John Clennon Holmes, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg - and others not so obvious who wound up as characters in On the Road: Beverly Buford ("Babe Rawlins"), Bob Buford ("Ray Rolands"), Lucien Carr ("Damion"), Jason Brierly ("Denver D. Doll"), Hal Chase ("Chad King"), Frank Jefferies ("Stan Shephard"), and Allan Temko ("Roland Major"). And so brief biographies of each person who appears in the letters have been provided in the catalogue.

Others who Kerouac discusses include Joyce Glassman (later Joyce Johnson), Kerouac's sister Caroline, his mother Gabrielle, and his ex-wife, Edie Parker. 

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“Burroughs is in town, is a big celebrity
among the subterraneans.”

(August 31, 1953)

___________

In short, everyone who mattered to Kerouac and played a role in his life and writing is found in these letters, a majestic trove. 

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“Of late I’ve been lamenting anew our 
late beloved master Doctor Samuel Johnson, 
reading him at lezzure in the hot
Florida sunshine of my yard 
– and gadzooks whatta man!”

(August 7, 1961)

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Collection Catalog.

I asked Horowitz, who has an uncanny knack for scoring the work of famous writers - he represented David Mamet, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, John Cheever, R. Buckminster Fuller, Spaulding Gray, Woody Guthrie, Hunter S. Thompson, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, etc., when they or their estates wished to sell their archives, and sold Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate notebooks in 2003 for $5,000,000 - how he got involved with this outstanding collection, an important piece of the puzzle that was Kerouac, a man who was "like a set of chord changes waiting for another musician to blow a chorus over it" (Leland).

"I started talking with Ed White in Denver twenty-five years ago," he told me, "a long patient negotiation that has led to this memorable catalogue prepared by our associate Heather Pisani.  

__________

“ English is the grooviest language!”
(February 9, 1962)

__________

"The project has, for our firm, a poignant quality: the White-Kerouac archive was the final major project that our colleague John McWhinnie oversaw.  It was John's vision for what we could do with the archive that, finally, persuaded the Whites to work with us. In many ways, this catalogue is a tribute to John, who will always be missed by those who were blessed to work with him." 

And by those in the trade who were fortunate to know him, this writer included. 

The catalogue, which includes commentary on each letter by Ed White and is collectible in its own right, is available for $25 and can be ordered here.

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Allen Ginsberg On Neal Cassady's Ashes

by Stephen J. Gertz

On January 17, 1971, a college student in Pennsylvania wrote a letter seeking assistance from Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. 

Dear Mr. Ginsberg,

I am a junior at Bucknell University at Lewisberg. This winter I have been gathering material for an exhibit to be displayed in the University library the latter part of this spring and through the summer months. I have chosen 'Allen Ginsberg -- Profile of a Poet' to be the theme.

I have devoted a great deal of time and effort to this project -- research and collection of displayable items of your notable career.

The exhibit, I think, will be a good one, but it has nothing personal relating to the subject.

In short, I have written you with the greatest of hope that you would send me your autograph (letter or simply signature) to make the exhibit more interesting. Your effort, believe me, will be greatly appreciated.

Cordially,

Larry Diefenbach

Ginsberg immediately replied upon receipt of the letter on January 21st, returning it with his holographic response.

Larry -

Here's a poem + some odd items you may'nt have seen?

Good luck - Allen G. Jan 21, 1971

Delicate eyes that blinded blue Rockies, all ash
Nipples, ribs touched w/my thumb are ash
Mouth my tongue touched once or twice all ash
bony cheeks soft on my belly are Cinder, ash
earlobes & eyelids, youthful cock-tip, curly pubis
breast warmth, man palm, high school thigh,
baseball biceps arm, asshole anneal'd to
               silken skin all ashes, all ashes again.

Ginsberg dates the poem's creation June 1968, signs it, and includes his hand-drawn Buddha's footprint logo.

Neal Cassady, Beat Generation muse and the vivid model for wild man Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road and Ginsberg's on-and-off lover for twenty years, died in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico on February  4, 1968. His body was found by the railroad tracks just outside of town; he had passed-out after walking the tracks on a cold and rainy night after attending a wedding party and was discovered in a coma. He died a few hours later, just shy of his 42d birthday after a lifetime of terminal velocity in the pursuit of heightened existence. Cassady was cremated and the disposition of his remains became contentious, with his wife, Carolyn, fending off two women who laid claim to his heart while he was alive, and post-mortem. 

Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, used car lot, San Francisco, 1955.
©Allen Ginsberg Estate

His "ashes were the subject of squabbles, first between Carolyn and 'a wild-looking hippie girl' and then with Diana Hansen, to whom Neal had got hitched in 1950, while still married to Carolyn. She called repeatedly, requesting a portion. Carolyn resisted at first, but then 'sent Diana some ashes, with love'” (NY Times, Nov 19, 2006).

Ginsberg later wrote:

"in 1968, I went down from San Francisco to visit Carolyn Cassady in Los Gatos. There's a poem of mine called 'On Neal's Ashes' which is a record of that visit, of opening the wooden container from Mexico City which had a silken bag full of his ashes. I opened the box and touched my finger inside of it and then looked in it and there was all this black and white cinder with a little rough stuff in it, pieces of bone that were burnt and blackened. So I said, 'Oh, so that's what happened to Neal Cassady.' It seemed magical that he'd disappeared and transformed into this tiny pound of gritty ashes. But it was definitive as his death. I realized it had all come to that. I hadn't seen him for a number of years and his disappearance was no big deal until I actually saw the remains of his body" (A Valentine for William Blake, Introduction to an unpublished manuscript of Ginsberg's Blake lectures).

This letter is being offered at Bonham's-San Francisco in their Fine Books & Manuscripts sale on February 17, 2013. It is estimated to sell for $800-$1200.

Ginsberg can be heard reciting On Neal's Ashes on Holy Soul Jelly Roll Vol. 4: Ashes & Blues.

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Letter images courtesy of Bonham's, with our thanks.
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Jack Kerouac, Painter

by Stephen J. Gertz

An original, untitled drawing of Jesus' crucifixion executed in colored crayons by Beat novelist Jack Kerouac recently came to market, went on the road and onto a collector's wall, lickety-split, for $7,500.

The scene depicts the shadow of Christ on the cross with three figures in the foreground attending to his body as an angel descends from heaven. In the background, a man, presumably, Judas, hangs from a gallows as the sun shines over distant hills. Kerouac boldly signed his name in the lower left corner.

Kerouac made the drawing for a favorite niece, using her crayons and sketch paper. Catholicism, which played such a strong, if subtly understated and misunderstood role in his novels and cosmology, is overt here.

Though a spontaneous work, this untitled painting is a rich, fully realized piece on a par with some of Kerouac's best art as found in his Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings (2004).

The appearance of this painting for public sale was something of an event: Kerouac's visual art is held mostly by institutions and examples are exceedingly scarce in the marketplace.

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Image courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

When Kerouac Met Dostoyevsky.
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Lost Souls Are Contained In "The Library Of Dust"