"Golden Jack"

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lot/golden jack YhBGYfu 632683969

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"Golden Jack"

KEROUAC, Jack (1922-1969). Autograph manuscript for "Golden Jack," 8 January 1949. 8 pages on four leaves of lined paper extracted from a spiral-bound notebook, 226 x 150mm (some creasing, most prominent on verso of last leaf; minor soiling). In custom portfolio. An early unpublished Kerouac manuscript of spiritual revelation that illuminates the genesis of On the Road. "Golden Jack" is an important surviving early work, composed at a moment when Kerouac's friendship with Neal Cassady was beginning to generate the material that would become On the Road . Written in January 1949 amid the New York gatherings that preceded Kerouac's first major cross-country trip with Cassady, the text offers a rare contemporary glimpse of the author's fascination with the figure who would later be immortalized as Dean Moriarty. At the same time, it reveals Kerouac in the midst of developing both the spiritual concerns and the spontaneous prose style that would define his mature work. "Golden Jack" leaves its reader with valuable insight into the genesis of On the Road and the development of the autobiographical mythology that would underpin much of Kerouac's later work. Moreover, as an early draft of a scene incorporated into the 1951 On the Road scroll, "Golden Jack" demonstrates that the novel's most memorable passages emerged through a longer process of development than the legend of its spontaneous composition suggests. In the manuscript, Kerouac recounts a rainy night in New York spent with Neal Cassady. What begins as a telling of jazz clubs, city streets, and youthful excitement gradually becomes a mystical meditation. Kerouac describes a moment of spiritual revelation in which the sights and sounds of the city, especially jazz music and the rain-soaked nighttime atmosphere, lead him toward an experience of God and a sense of unity with the larger universe. The piece is also a remarkable early example of the literary method Kerouac was then developing: its cascading associations, rhythmic repetitions, and accumulations of names, places, memories, and sensations mirror the improvisational structures of the bebop musicians he admired. Like the jazz of Charlie Parker and his contemporaries, the prose advances through spontaneous invention, one thought freely leading to the next. In part: " It was a rainy night in New York ... Neal and I parked the car and ran in the rain to the nightclub and sat down in front of the bandstand. There was a saxophone lying on top of the piano beside a trumpet and a trombone. The saxophone buttons made a shadow on the wall that looked like a procession of camels—a caravan ... I watched—and thought of the vast rainy night of N.Y. outside—and all our friends, and the places they were--and how all my life I had loved the ineffable, that which quivers on the horizon between heaven and earth, the sad light, the red celestials, the Pallestrinas [sic] of the sky—and I thought of how I thought of Neal, in his 'fine San Fran night' across the dark America (the picture on my wall, 'night fright') and all the night in the names Allan Eager, Dexter Gordon, bebop, Fillmore & Geary, Chicago, Louanne, Al, Denver, 'The Denver birds,' the Loop, Houston, New Orleans, Allen, Count Dracula in the Shadows, the Shadow, The Castle, Doctor Sax, me, God, America, telephone wires, freights, hitch-hiking, Joe Martin, poor Peter, Dennison, all of it at once ... ... The rain, New York — All I know of New York on a rainy night, from the Shadow to Wolfe’s ships to the bebop night — the shining streets in the mist —and all of us, the Vampire bowing and saying (in Abbot & Costello movie) 'You look more lovelier than ever my dear’ (after all his years of night) —MY GOD I FOUND—AND IT IS IN THE SWIRLING NIGHT ... ” The manuscript anticipates the celebrated George Shearing scene in On the Road (Part Three, Chapter 10), revealing Kerouac already transforming jazz, friendship, and moments of spiritual exaltation into the literary mythology that would define his masterpiece. Kerouac had been gathering material for the novel since 1948 and the first complete draft would be the April 1951 scroll manuscript. Part of page four is a separate section entitled " An Exegesis—Why I Found God in the Rainy Night. " Here he refers to Dr. Sax, which he had also begun working on: “ It is because rain spiritualizes — and rain sleeps ... Because children sleep when it rains at night. And it is the sea coming back to us. (I will now write ‘Doctor Sax’ entirely different.) It doesn’t matter so much what people do in the daytime — it’s what they dream and feel and think on a rainy night. Even Doctor Sax is still on a rainy night, see ... Thinking of the night, I turn on the shortwave radio in the kitchen ... it lights up green. The green night, my friends! The green Frisco night of fogs — and Fillmore, Geary, Turk, Market, Mission, Embarcadero, Bush, Van Ness, Lombard, —Alcatraz across the lights — and Henri Cru, Dianne, Neal, Carolyn, Thompson, Ed Soucier alto-man — you see, they are all there in the green night, & immemorially. I was a boy, 16, writing diaries in Lowell, Mass., trying to describe the Lowell night, and the flood (‘humpbacked Merrimac’) ... I was a great lover at seven, I was interested in the thighs of women and girls, I peeked from the top floor and I was a little love man — But the night! The rainy foggy night! ... You must understand that I am going to lead a way to a something now. And me sleeps, too — like rain. God on January 8 did visit me, and I, imperfectly, rose — (a verb of ascension, no dissension). ” In this manuscript memory, place, friendship, jazz, and spirituality converge in a manner that is central to Kerouac's writing. Even the title, "Golden Jack," suggests the elevation of personal experience into myth, transforming Neal Cassady from friend and companion into a figure of visionary significance.

Estimate:$30,000

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