Kerouac, Jack

Maggie Cassidy. New York: Avon, [1959]

8vo. Half black morocco, ruled in gilt, spine with with morocco labels, top edge gilt, publisher's pictorial wrappers bound in. Collector's cloth clamshell box🌳.

First edition, presentation copy inscribed by the author💝 to his mother, Gabrielle "Gabe" Kerouac: "To Mémêre / from Ti Jean / Read in here / on page 80 to 84 / about Papa Léo / Jean XXX."

Jack Kerouac's "Mémêre" was perhaps the most important and influential figure in his life and work; they lived together for much of his adult life and particularly her Catholicism had a profound impact on his literary output. "Ti Jean𒊎" (Little Jack), was a nickname from childhood that she continued to use in his adult life. Kerouac’s close relationship with his mother is further discussed in lo𒊎t 56. 

"When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that’s too deep for you now, Ti Mon Pousse."

"Papa Léo" provides somber advice for the young Jack in the above passage, in the guise of his alter ego Emil "Pop" Duluoz. Jack's father and Gabrielle's husband's real name was Léo-Alcide Kéroack.♏ Kerouac had a decidedly different paternal relationship to his maternal one. “Papa” had a drinking and gambling problem, leaving the ꦕfamily often short of money. His drifting between jobs is narrated in the passage referenced by Kerouac in the inscription. 

Kerouac fell in lo💃ve with the Irish-American Mary Carney ("Maggie Cassidy") when he was sixteen, living in Lowell. This book charts Jack's relationship with her as well as his close friends at the time and his family, most pertinently his father. 

“...in seven years he’d be no more…the sun would shine on his 🅺nose no more—” 

This lin🅺e forebodes his father’s premature death from 🐈drinking, on May 17 1946, which eerily foreshadowed the author’s own in 1969, also from complications related to long term alcohol abuse. On his deathbed, Léo made his son swear to look after his mother, which he did so for the rest of his life. The fear of death and the foreshadowing of death haunts Kerouac’s works; childhood experiences like the passing of his brother Gerald and witnessing the sudden death of a stranger in the street when he was twelve years old led to a lifelong timorous fixation with the end, see lot 60.

Certainly a remarkable rarity with a most intimate association.

REFERENCE:

Charters, A7

PROVENANCE:

Gabrielle Kerouac (presentation inscription) — Christie's New🦩 York, 8 April 2003, lot 164 (undesignated consig🃏nor)