capote, truman. four presentation copies, including ``other voices, other rooms'',...

The Library of an English Bibliophile, Part VI

8vo (202 x 135mm.), FIRST EDITION, original beige cloth lettered in red, dust-jacket, one neatly repaired tear on jacket

other voices, other rooms. new york: random house, 1948

Fine Books and Manuscripts including Property from the Eric C. Caren Collection

Property of Claudia Durst Johnson LEE, HARPER A fine group of letters to Claudia Durst Johnson and other manuscript material Together, 21 autograph letters, 5 typed letters, and 3 inscribed Christmas cards, all signed ("Nelle"), comprising 47 pp., various sizes, New York, Monroeville Alabama. and other places, 18 November 1992–17 May 2009; 24 autograph and typed envelopes — with: photocopy of Johnson's 12-page chronology of Lee's life and career, with numerous autograph annotations by Lee, and signed by Lee and Johnson — also with: the Arts & Books section of the Daily Telegraph, London, 12 April 1997, featuring a lengthy article on Lee by Michael Shelden, extensively annotated in red ink by Lee; vertical and horizontal folds. Harper Lee's revealing autobiographical notes and letters to Claudia Durst Johnson, "the one friend who can be depended upon to understand what it means to be Harper Goddamn Lee." Harper Lee's friendship with literary scholar Claudia Johnson began in 1992 when Johnson was starting to work on a study of the author. The two women quickly established a rapport and Lee not only wrote frank personal letters to Johnson, but also provided biographical details to facilitate Johnson's critical studies. In 1994, Johnson published To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries and in 2018, Reading Harper Lee: Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. Of great interest is a copy of the newspaper article "The Writer Vanishes" by Michael Shelden, published in the Daily Telegraph in 1997 and annotated by Lee in vivid red ink. Where Shelden brings up rumors about Lee's sexuality, Lee writes in the margin, "I am not, never was, & never will be a lesbian." She denies that she plays golf every day, noting that she hasn't raised a club in fifteen years. Her most telling annotations concern Truman Capote and the authorship of In Cold Blood. Where Johnson is quoted in the article saying that some of Lee's notes went directly into the book, Lee appends a long note, which reads in part, "This is not quite right. Joint authorship was never intended. Our friendship didn't turn sour because of that, but because for the last 12 or 15 years of his life, T. seemed hell-bent on trying to destroy everyone who had ever loved him …. I suppose drugs & booze made him obviously psychopathic, but the seeds were always there, even in early childhood. So T. turned out not to be Dill, after all." Sometime in the early 1990s, Johnson sent Lee a 12-page "Chronology of Nelle Harper Lee's Life and Times." Next to this designation, Lee has written "or Truman Capote's?? Aside from Kansas we actually saw little of each other in our adult lives, and almost nothing of each other in the last 15 years or T.'s life. Our interests were quite different!" She goes on to deny the stories that the two, as children, wrote stories on an old typewriter in a tree house. She corrects what she considers to be "flights of fancy" by Capote biographer Gerald Clarke. According to Lee, the setting of Other Voices, Other Rooms is not based on Monroeville, but on a town in Louisiana. She also comments on the the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird and on stage versions of the novel. Harper Lee's letters to Claudia Johnson are also a rich source of information on Lee's attitudes toward a number of things, with special emphasis on her ambivalent relationship with Monoreville, Alabama, and its inhabitants. She refers to her hometown as "the hated place". In a letter of 2 July 2002, she writes, "If it were not for [her sister] Alice, I'd never go there again, Aside from a few friends, I hate the people. The Snopses are in full throttle there. It's amazing what 3 generations of growing prosperity and declining education can produce: Snopses from the courthouse to the White House." Lee felt more at home with "the peace and quiet of Manhattan" than in Monroeville. On 20 February 1997, she wrote to Johnson from the New York Society Library "which still has card-index files. If they go to computers, guess I'll have to quit. The NY Public (where I was educated) now is baffling, annoying, and wretched. How do you find something that's not on a computer?" In 2001, Johnson was asked to give a talk about Mockingbird in Chicago. Lee gave her blessing and wrote, "Thank God it's not some little shit from U. of Va., N. C. or somewhere else 'Southern' making his superiority over his audiences the main feature of his address. Golly, how I despise young academics." In December 2006, Dean Robert F. Olin wrote to Lee inviting her to attend an "Arty Party" at the University of Alabama to meet Mrs. Louise Schwartz of the Truman Capote Trust. The Trust was giving $76,000 for scholarships in creative writing at the school. In a paragraph annotated by Lee with two large exclamation marks, Dean Olin wrote, "Mrs. Schwartz was pleased to consider that the Truman Capote Literary Trust's presence at The University of Alabama symbolically reunites Mr. Capote with you and honors the friendship and careers of two Alabamians who changed the literary landscape of this nation." Lee forwarded the letter to Johnson, telling her to "keep this one for your H. L. archive!" She goes on to write, "Can you believe the nerve of these people? I don't know why, at this late date, they want to make Truman respectable. I guess it's because they've been living off him since his death in 1984. Guess money will buy anything — the easiest purchase is a university dean." In one of the last letters in the collection, written from an Alabama nursing home, Lee comments on Barack Obama: "The newspaper news is all I get & I'm frankly tired of reading of Barack the Boy Genius. He is nice but is too nice of a nice thing." The Harper Lee/Claudia Johnson archive is an invaluable source of biographical information.

lee, harper | a fine group of letters to claudia durst johnson and other manuscript material

Autograph manuscript and revised typescript for portions of the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, together 118 holograph pages and 77 typed pages (mostly 11 x 8  1/2  in.; 278 x 215 mm), [Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), Nantucket, and New York, 1946–47] 

capote, truman

Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Random House, [1948]

Rock & Pop

fair copies, comprising: i) 'White Room', 2 pages; ii) 'Theme for an Imaginary Western', arranged for vocal, organ, piano and bass, 2 pages; iii) 'Tickets to Waterfalls', two copies, one arranged for vocal and backing in musical notation with chords, 2 pages, the other with musical notation and chords, 4 pages; iv) 'The Weird of Hermiston', arranged for vocal, piano, guitar and bass, 2 pages; v) 'Rope Ladder to the Moon', two copies, one arranged for lead voice, cello and backing, 2 pages, the other additionally scored for guitar, bass and drums, 4 pages; vi) 'Never tell your mother...' / 'To Isengard', 'Mother' scored with a brass section, 1 page, the remaining pages with an arrangement of 'To Isengard' for vocals and guitar, 3 pages; many signed by Bruce, mostly pencil on bi-folio musical manuscript sheets (357 x 265mm. and similar), undated,  occasional soiling, including coffee stains, sheets worn at extremities, one sheet partially torn along fold

group of six autograph music manuscripts and arrangements

Your Own Sylvia: Sylvia Plath’s letters to Ted Hughes and other items, property of Frieda Hughes

Sylvia Plath Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes ("Dearest Teddy-ponk...") on the composition of her poem 'Monologue at 3 AM', which she sends to him for comment ("...Wrote a bad fourteen line poem last night; will probably write many such, bad because they are naked and do not have the sophistication of technique which cares how it says more than what it says; you must criticize coldly, even if you know if it is all about you and done in such simple love..."), also describing how the college is beginning to fill as term commences, her meeting with "a new American Fulbright girl", the weakness of the latest New Yorker, and the pain of his absence, occasional autograph corrections, 5 pages, 8vo (174 x 134mm), RMS Queen Elizabeth headed stationary [but Whitstead, Newnham College, Cambridge,] 4 October 1956 "...I feel terribly miserable and noble; like learning to live without legs and arms and with mechanical intestines after some colossal operation which nobody really thought I'd come out of; I'll never stop this incredibly overpowering sense of absence; I'll just learn to wall it up in a series of bare enormous rooms, which I don't enter except when I'm alone; all the rest is rot..." SYLVIA PLATH ON THE COMPOSITION OF HER POEM 'MONOLOGUE AT 3 AM'. This was the first poem completed by Plath after her return to Cambridge. Whilst in her letters she promises renunciation and writes of her attempt to deal with her husband's absence by cutting herself off from her emotions, the poem's violent imagery expresses an alternative: "Better that every fiber crack | and fury make head [...] than to sit mute, twitching so | under prickling stars". She writes of her dissatisfaction with the New Yorker: "the poems, I have cold-eyedly discovered, are all weak". Even 'Sestina' by Elizabeth Bishop is sentimental, and James Thurber's latest offerings "have a false ring, sort of singsong prose". This is the iconoclasm of a writer who knows that she is finding a voice that marks a new generation. In the background, quotidian life in Cambridge continues: new students from around the world are arriving and a reluctant Sylvia Plath is enlisted to show them around; she meets the "Lady of the Laundromat" for the first time since her return; she arranges for Ted Hughes's new suit to be sent up to Yorkshire. LITERATURE: The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume One, pp.1269-72

View 1 of Lot 8: Sylvia Plath | Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes, with her poem 'Monologue at 3am', 4 October 1956

sylvia plath | typed letter signed, to ted hughes, with her poem 'monologue at 3am', 4 october 1956

Important Modern Literature from the Library of an American Filmmaker

Kerouac, Jack The Dharma Bums. New York: The Viking Press, 1958 8vo. Light dampstaining to a few leaves, with associated light cockling to some sheets. Original black cloth; covers slightly bowed and soiled from dampstaining. Pictorial dust jacket; rubbed. In a quarter black morocco slipcase. First edition. A remarkable presentation copy, inscribed not only to the author’s mother, Gabrielle “Gabe” Kerouac, but also to her two cats on the front free endpaper: “To Ma–& Timmy–& Tyke / A third adventure to pay for the house, the cat food, the brandy & the peaceful sleep / From Dharma Bum Jack / Ti Jean XXXX / Ma, you're on pages 132, 133, 148 / Little Paul on pages 140 / Big Paul 143-144.” The two Pauls referred to in the inscription are Paul Blake, husband of Kerouac's sister Caroline, and his son. Kerouac’s inscription references his hopes that sales of The Dharma Bums would allow him to pay off the mortgage on his Northport home, “thinking this would make it easier for him and his mother to sell the Long Island house and move to Florida.” The novel was published on the 2nd of October, and by the end of the month he was disappointed that the novel had not made The New York Times best-seller list. He soon advised his agent Sterling Lord to make moves to place a forthcoming book for a large advance. At this same time, with his mother away visiting his sister Caroline, Kerouac wrote to Allen Ginsberg and described his “harried” existence at home without Mémêre (see Selected Letters 1957-1969, p. 181). “Gabe had only a fifth-grade education but she had narrative and descriptive powers. Sometimes Jack even compared her storytelling to Dostoevsky’s. As she built up the picture of Jack’s selfless little mother valiantly holding down the fort at home, weaving a rag rug for his return like Penelope waiting for Odysseus, Gabe had an excellent instinct for when to bring in the pathos in case he was enjoying himself too much...” (Joyce Johnson, The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, NY: Viking, 2012, p. 248). Gabrielle Kerouac’s Catholicism was central to Kerouac’s development, but so too were her flaws. And she often reminded him of the promise he had made to his father that he would care for her. It was a promise that he kept, despite his incessant travel, as he always returned home to memere. He and his wife Stella were living with her in St. Petersburg, Florida when he died in 1969. In the last letter included in his Selected Letters, sent to his nephew Paul (mentioned in the inscription here), Kerouac wrote: “This is Uncle Jack. I’ve turned over my entire estate, real, personal, and mixed, to Mémêre, and if she dies before me, it is then turned to you, and if I die thereafter, it all goes to you… Mémêre is saying: ‘The last letter I wrote you I asked you for a reply and you still haven’t replied. I’m very proud of you, my little blond boy, because of your work for your country… I love you, and I’m lonely. I’d like to see you because it makes me renew the instincts I had with your Ma.’ [Signed] Jack (& Mémêre).” In life, death, and all of his literary works, Jack Kerouac was indelibly tied to his mother and family. One of Gabrielle’s letters to Jack illuminates the nature of their bond: “Honey, I'm still not able to realize that you have left me for good. I keep searching the Boulevard looking out the window for hours thinking I'll see you come walking and waving to me. I dare say I miss you a lot now and more so now that I know you don't belong to me anymore but that's life and sooner or later I'll get used to the idea. I hope you will be very happy, Honey, and that nothing will ever stop you from being a great Man. With the help of your new Mother and a good Wife you should become a great writer” (Women of the Beat Generation). Very rare inscribed. No other inscribed copy of the first edition of The Dharma Bums has appeared at auction, according to records. A copy of the first English edition inscribed to Lucien Carr and his wife Cessa was sold in these rooms in 2003, and Christie’s New York sold a copy in 2005 signed (but not inscribed to an individual) by Kerouac and a cast of other Beat figures. These are the only loosely related comparables found in the auction records since the book’s publication. A more biographically poignant association hardly can be imaged. REFERENCE: Charters A4a PROVENANCE: Gabrielle Kerouac (presentation inscription) — Roger Rechler (Christie’s New York, 11 October 2002, lot 181)

View 1 of Lot 56: Kerouac, Jack | The Dharma Bums, inscribed to his mother and her two cats 

kerouac, jack | the dharma bums, inscribed to his mother and her two cats

The Passion of American Collectors: Property of Barbara and Ira Lipman | Highly Important Printed and Manuscript Americana 

Adams, John Quincy Autograph letter signed ("J. Q. Adams") as a Representative from Massachusetts, to Elijah Hayward, harshly criticizing the institution of slavery, foreseeing its end in the United States, and predicting a better future for the human race 4 pages (252 x 200 mm) on a bifolium of wove paper, Washington, 20 April 1837; pinholes at intersecting folds, a few very short marginal fold separations, some light staining. Half red morocco slipcase, chemise. In a magnificent letter revealing the increasing passion of his antislavery beliefs, John Quincy Adams forcefully condemns the institution of slavery: "It shocks the moral sense of every soul not contaminated by the practice of oppression." In May 1836 the House of Representatives adopted a resolution that became known as the "Gag Rule." This resolution, readopted and even strengthened by subsequent congresses, automatically "tabled," or postponed action on all petitions relating to slavery without hearing them. John Quincy Adams quickly became the leader of the opposition to this stifling of the voices of enslaved persons and abolitionists. He here elaborates his views to Elijah Hayward, a Massachusetts native then resident in Ohio, who had written to Adams to congratulate him on his maiden speech on the controversy. While clearly demonstrating Adams's righteous anger about slavery, the letter also reveals a deep confidence in humanity's ability to improve itself. Adams begins by assuring Hayward that he remembers him and recollecting to him the pride they should share in their home state: "I remember also that you mentioned to me once that you was a native of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, whence I also derive my birth, and of whose felicities I believe it one of the greatest, that from her originated that Ordinance for the Northwestern Territory the first abolition of Slavery on this continent, which has already given to this Union four of its most flourishing states, in which there is neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless as punishment for crime." Adams advances gradually to the subject of slavery and the gag rule, first enumerating the various other changes he foresees in coming generations. "I believe the day will come when there will be neither war, slavery, nor hereditary kings upon earth. How many centuries it will take to accomplish this revolution it is not given to me to foretell. If the population of the North American continent should increase for two centuries to come in the same proportion as it has regularly done for the half century since the establishment of the Constitution of the United States, in two hundred years from this day there will be three thousand millions of the human race living on its surface. There is room for them all, and for as many more on the continent of South America. The steamboat and the railway have already approximated distances so that we travel five hundred miles in a day. Speed is power, and the multiplication of that power in the last half century has at least kept pace with that of population. And in the same half century, notwithstanding the bloody wars that have waged, the uniform tendency of the minds and hearts of civilized men towards each other has been from cruelty to benevolence, from harshness to humanity. The question whether man has in any case whatever the right to take the life of man is sinking deeper and deeper into the Consciences of men. The right of offensive war has not only fallen into disfavor but has become exceedingly problematical. Personal imprisonment for debt is gradually disappearing from all Christian Codes. Even the right of defensive war has been denied in theory, and the denial has been supported by powerful arguments." Warming to his subject, Adams takes direct aim at the hypocrisy of slavery and the deformed logic of those who would defend it. "The right of man to property in man has been for many years scoured out of all decent moral and intellectual company. With shame and confusion of face I ask it that countrymen of ours at this time are laboring to roll this rock of Sisyphus uphill and are heaping Pelion upon Ossa, to prove that slavery is sanctioned by the laws of nature and of God; but if Julian the apostate, armed with Genius, Learning, Philosophy, dauntless courage and imperial power was unable to establish upon the throne of Heaven the three hundred thousand Gods of Rome, the Sophists of tyranny never will reinfuse into the hearts of men the belief that eternal Justice can approve the bondage of slavery. It shocks the moral sense of every soul not contaminated by the practice of oppression." In a moving anecdote, Adams references his political opponent, John Randolph of Roanoke, an aristocratic planter and congressman, who manumitted his slaves, "heartily regretting that I have ever been the owner of one." Adams reminds Hayward that "John Randolph declared the Declaration of Independence, the great charter of mankind, 'a barrage of abstractions'—but John Randolph died with "Remorse" upon his lips, and emancipated his slaves by his Will, 'because in his conscience he believed they ought to be free.'" In a stirring passage, Adams next links slavery to monarchy, an institution that the United States had already thrown off, invoking the Declaration of Independence and referring to enslaved persons as America's "own people": "Slavery is a part and parcel of the divine right of kings, and no thinking man can read Hobbes and Sir Robert Filmer, without perceiving that all the arguments which they urge in favour of despotic power in Government, and against the theory of human rights, are the identical and only arguments by which a colour of justification can be given to slavery. This must eventually be the sense of all mankind; but that in this Country, with an appeal to God that all men are born with an inalienable right to Liberty; and that this is a self-evident truth—that a nation founding its existence upon the proclamation of that law, should suffer its ears to hear from its own degenerate Sons, that one sixth part of its own people are chattels, to whom no rights can belong [here, words seem to fail Adams, who resorts to writing a series of ellipses before continuing] my dear Sir, when Daniel O'Connell in the British Parliament, pronounces us in the face of Heaven and Earth a Nation of Hypocrites and Liars, we may answer him with Billingsgate upon Earth, but will Bishop England just from Hayti tell us what we shall say to Heaven?" As he nears his conclusion, Adams's rhetoric becomes more vehement, before closing with a more reflective, conciliatory, and hopeful tone. "No—never, never can Slavery again be reconciled to the rights, or to the duties of man. Our slave-trading Professors, and Governors, and Chancellors, and Bishops, may cauterize their own consciences and those of their accomplices, while they live, with sophistication worthy of Belial Pandemonium, but with John Randolph, 'Remorse' will be their dying word, without even the atonement of emancipating their Slaves at death. They may, and I fear will rivet the chains of slavery upon their unhappy fellow creatures whom they hold in bondage. They may, and I fear will restore the extinguished curse of slavery in Mexico, and thereby fortify and reinforce and spread its odious dominion in our own country; protracting its final doom for unblest ages to come—but in the chancery of Heaven that doom is sealed—Slavery shall vanish from the earth; and the race of man, descended from one father, shall live as a band of brothers upon Earth. … Your letter has led me far into futurity, and far beyond my depth. In the anticipation that for two hundred years to come the population of the North American continent will increase with the same rapidity that it has in the five decades of the last half of the last century … and we contemplate what this mass of physical, moral, and intellectual congregated human power may effect for the improvement of the earth, and of the condition of its mortal and immortal inhabitant, may we not in humble hope invoke the blessing of the Father of Spirits upon every purpose intended to promote the universal emancipation of man?" PROVENANCE Skinner, 18 November 2012, lot 2621B ["a small New England nonprofit institution," as described by the Quincy Patriot Ledger, 13 November 2012] REFERENCE Celebration of My Country 179; cf. Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York, 1996)

View 1 of Lot 22: Adams, John Quincy | "No—never, never can Slavery again be reconciled to the rights, or to the duties of man."

Results for "Other Voices Other Rooms"