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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Beware Of Hart Crane's Sombrero

by Stephen J. Gertz

Hart Crane sans sombrero.

Literary sombrero alert!

Hart Crane's sombrero rests in the University of Vermont Library's Special Collections. But is it really Hart Crane's sombrero? As it turns out, Hart Crane's Mexican hat dances under a cloud and is likely full of beans.

Last Tuesday, Booktryst's Alastair Johnston reported on finding a copy of W.H. Davies' Collected Poems (1916) with poet Hart Crane's bookplate and inscription to another. It was bogus; though the bookplate was real the signature was not.

"If you search the Internet, you can probably find several 'association copies' with Hart Crane's bookplate. A word of caution: After his death in 1932 Hart Crane's mother gave (or sold) some of his personal papers including a pile of Crane's bookplates to a bookseller in New York City. The dealer then pasted the bookplates in books chosen at random from his stock and misrepresented them as being from Crane's library. Not only was the dealer a crook, he was not too swift, as some of the bookplates were pasted in books published after Crane's death. 

"The dealer was Samuel Loveman, a forgotten poet, better known as a forger, who claimed to have been Hart Crane's lover. While a bookseller in New York, he sold books from Crane's library with a forged bookplate, as well as forging pencil signatures of Hawthorne, Melville and Twain" (Lew Jaffe, Bookplate Junkie).

"Samuel Loveman was born in 1887 in Cleveland, Ohio. An aspiring poet, Loveman left the Midwest in order to pursue his career as a writer and to live an openly gay lifestyle. He moved to New York City in the early 1920s where he made the acquaintance of several prominent authors including Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, and H.P. Lovecraft. Loveman owned a bookstore named the Bodley Bookshop in Manhattan with his partner David Mann. He wrote two books, The Hermaphrodite was a poem published in July 1926 and subsequently republished with additional poems in 1936 and Twenty-One Letters, a collection of letters sent to him by Ambrose Bierce. He also published The Sphinx in 1944. Loveman died in relative obscurity at the Jewish Home and Hospital in 1976" (Columbia University Libraries Archives).

Loveman, executor of Crane's estate, was his correspondent, very much so during the last four years of Crane's life, and after the poet's death he published Brom Weber's biography (1948) of the poet, who, on April 27, 1932, committed suicide by jumping off the rear deck of the ship that was returning him to the United States from Vera Cruz.

Crane had been living in Mexico 1931-1932 on a Guggenheim Fellowship so it's quite possible that he owned a sombrero. However...

Booktryst received the following Letter to the Editor from a bookseller who  had read Alastair's post.

"After reading about the Hart Crane bookplate, I thought you might enjoy the fact that I was, not long ago, given the task of appraising Hart Crane's sombrero. So how do we know that it actually belonged to Crane? There was a letter of authentication from Samuel Loveman, apparently signed as Crane's literary executor.

"The letter, dated July 23, 1962, was on the letterhead of the Bodley Book Shop, 550 Fifth Avenue, New York 36, NY.

"From the letter: '...sombrero...was originally in the possession of Hart Crane, and was worn by him during his stay in Mexico. It was among his effects when they were shipped after his death to the United States.'

"I, of course, took it at face value and assumed that everything and everyone were on the truthful side of things. After reading about Loveman and the bookplates, I'm beginning to wonder" (Name withheld).

You'd think that authentication by the executor of Crane's estate would be solid and unassailable but given the shenanigans of Loveman it can now be safely presumed that anything signed by Crane with his bookplate or relics purportedly owned by Crane are highly suspect and probably fraudulent until proven innocent.

Literary artifacts rest in dark waters and live and die on three principles: provenance, provenance, and provenance. Though it wasn't a literary relic,  I once spent a full week chasing down the emmis on Lola Montez's banjo. The banjo was right - of the period and top of the line by a famed 19th century banjo maker and preserved in a beautiful hand-made parqueted wood case one would expect to belong to a celebrated performer. A respected auction house and major bookseller had declared that the banjo had belonged to Lola Montez but provided no information to back the story up, which, it turned out, I could not substantiate at all; there was not even the slightest hint of her ownership to be found and I was in full sherlock. 

One day I expect someone, somewhere to offer a pair of Charles Bukowski's jockey shorts for sale. Unless they are autographed by Bukowski with an authenticated signature I'd stay away from them, no matter how stained and redolent they are of beer, booze, cheap wine and corner bars.

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Ernest Hemingway's Typewriter Comes To Auction

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

One of the most important literary relics of the 20th century, Ernest Hemingway’s fully documented typewriter, on which he typed his last book, is being offered by auctioneer Profiles In History in its Rare Books & Manuscripts sale, Wednesday, July 10, 2013.  It is estimated to sell for $60,000 - $80,000.

The Halda Swedish-made typewriter is fully functional and comes with its original leatherette case exhibiting somewhat tattered transportation stickers from the American Export Line and the French Line. Both have crucial identification in an unknown hand, marked “E. Hemi...” on the American Export Line sticker, and “Hemingway” with destination of “Le Hav...” on the French Line sticker, each torn and scuffed from extensive travel. The typewriter was obtained from famed author A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway's close friend, who wrote the definitive biography, Papa Hemingway.

Hotchner obtained the typewriter from the heirs of well-known Hemingway friend Bill Davis, Teo and Nena Davis. Bill Davis maintained a house in Malaga, Spain where Hemingway lived in 1959. Author Hotchner indicated in a private interview that he was there with Hemingway in that year when he was typing portions of The Dangerous Summer, on this very typewriter during 1959-1960. During this period, Hemingway was working on the final draft of his Paris memoirs from the 1920s which would later become A Moveable Feast, so it is quite possible this typewriter was used in creating that work as well. The typewriter is accompanied by a signed letter of provenance from Nena Davis, who witnessed Hemingway using this typewriter while writing The Dangerous Summer, his non-fiction account of the rivalry between bullfighters Luis Miguel Dominguín and his brother-in-law, Antonio Ordóñez, during the "dangerous summer" of 1959.

This typewriter was last seen in the marketplace in 2009 when it was offered by John Reznikoff's University Archives for $100,000.

For perspective, in 2009 Christie’s-New York sold author Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, used to compose his novels, for the extraordinary sum of $254,500. Had this Hemingway typewriter been used to write The Sun Also Rises its estimate would surely exceed that quarter million dollar price.

Below, Reznikoff talks about this typewriter and demonstrates its functionality.

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Images courtesy of Profiles In History, with our thanks. 

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Of Related Interest:

Never Seen Hemingway Photos As Teen Come To Auction.

Hemingway Drinks Snake Wine, Gets Punched Out, And Other News From "Ernesto."

Hemingway Letter Recounts Near-Fatal Plane Crash.

Ernest Hemingway Down For The Count.

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