Before I examine the Woolf letters, Funke Butler gives me the lavish Woolf catalogue. This includes not only the correspondence mentioned above, but also many other documents and rare items surrounding her work and personal life. There are proofs and inscribed first editions of all the major works of fiction and non-fiction. There is the photograph page from her 1923 passport, attributed to A.V. Woolf (her seldom employed Christian name Adeline). And there are also other great letters, including one from Virginia to Vanessa written on the eve of her sister’s wedding, signed with the affectionate pet names Billy, Bartholomew, Mungo and Wombat, commending Clive Bell as ‘clean, merry and sagacious, a wasteful eater and fond of fossils’. And then there is another one from Leonard Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, circa 1927, with instructions for his wife’s care. ‘I am entrusting a valuable animal out of my menagerie to you for the night. It is not quite sound in the head piece. It should be well fed & put to bed punctually at 11. It will be v. good of you if you will see to this & pay not attention to anything wh. it may try to say for itself.’
There are 77 lots in the catalogue, many containing multiple items. The collection had been put together over four decades by Bill Beekman, now a senior finance partner at the New York City law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. What had ignited his V.W. bug? In the late 60s he was majoring in the history and literature of modern England and France at Harvard, and although Woolf wasn’t part of the main curriculum, a self-directed tutorial led him to read To the Lighthouse. ‘It moved me very much (as it does so many people)’ he told me via email. ‘I had grown up with bound volumes of the old Vanity Fair and was familiar with her image and mystique as a highbrow modernist, and was really moved to read her by reading Albee’s play [Who’s Afraid of . . .] in another class.’ He ended up writing his undergraduate thesis on ‘Character and Characterization in Madame Bovary and Mrs Dalloway’.
The first letter he bought was fairly insubstantial, from Leonard to someone who inquired about buying a book at the very beginning of the Hogarth Press. Beekman acquired the suicide sequence directly from Vita’s descendants, via a dealer, and remembers being ‘very moved by Leonard’s terse thoughtfulness’. His favourite is the one Virginia wrote to Vanessa on the eve of Vanessa’s marriage, ‘complete with little doodles of animal paw prints and bound with a red ribbon – very childish.’
I wondered what had persuaded Beekman to part with them. He was retiring in a few years, he said, and he felt he could no longer really afford to buy the stuff that would enhance the collection. ‘When a collection becomes static, it becomes much less interesting.’
The Woolf items are only for sale en bloc. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is asking $4.5m for the collection although Funke Butler tells me this is a ‘soft’ $4.5m, perhaps because it has been on sale for more than a year and has yet to be purchased. But soft may also refer to what one would have to be in the head to spend such money on the (albeit fascinating) cast-offs and daily amassments of a writer who’s not exactly flavour of the month. For a soft $4.5m one could buy half a million new paperbacks of Mrs Dalloway and give them out to first-year literature undergraduates – would one not be spreading the word about Woolf better that way?
‘The collection is an exquisite example of what a dedicated private collector can do,’ Glenn Horowitz says. ‘I’m very proud in the hand I had in helping Mr Beekman build it. Those very poignant letters between Leonard and Vanessa to Vita are sensational.’ But the price? ‘In this particular case I probably permitted some element of the sentimental to overwhelm my fine-honed critical acumen, and conceded to the aspirational wishes of my friends the Beekman family, who had worked themselves into a heightened state of consciousness over what they had accomplished.’ Rather than sell it as a collection, he now believes ‘it should be put back on the market object by object over a number of years’.
And what would Virginia Woolf have made of the price? Perhaps, in a post-post-structuralist world, she would have come round to the idea. But she certainly wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of a literary afterlife in a dealer’s New York office when she died. The very last words she wrote, in the margin of the second suicide note she left for her husband, read, without a question mark, ‘Will you destroy all my papers.’
‘It’s a very good time for letters at Glenn Horowitz Bookstore,’ Sarah Funke Butler says. This is particularly true, it seems, if you are a fan of women’s writing. They have not only Woolf in their files, but also many fine things from Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Atwood and Susan B. Anthony, Pearl Buck, Jane Bowles and Fanny Burney (to take just the As and Bs) as the company strengthens its archive of feminism and Judaica; the firm’s catalogues are purchased by libraries as valuable artefacts in their own right. ‘We quote so heavily from letters that you almost don’t need to get a copy of it,’ Funke Butler says. ‘But of course you don’t want to trust some book dealer, you want to see the primary source, you want to hold it and sniff it.’
We talk about copyright issues in her catalogues, and how much they can get away with without spoiling the value of exclusivity to a prospective collector. Most copyright holders and purchasers are generous with their permissions, she says (the copyright of a letter traditionally rests with the original writer or their estate, rather than the recipient or present owner). But some estates and owners are more restrictive than others. Funke Butler studied James Joyce at Harvard, and is now thrilled to be handling many of his letters. But when she recently wanted to blog about a Joyce letter (she contributes news of interesting letters to the Paris Review online), she found the Joyce estate less than keen. And when she contacted the owner of a Joyce letter she had recently sold to ask permission to post a scan, this was also declined. ‘She said, “I want my Joyce letters to be my Joyce letters,”’ Funke Butler remembers. ‘There’s something about the temperament of the Joyce collector that breeds this. Joyce definitely draws a different temperament.’ She says the estate is ‘famously bad’ by which she means famously protective, which may be famously unfortunate for letters dealers. ‘I don’t know why that [attitude from the estate] would impact the actual collectors except that it might breed a sense that this sort of behaviour did give you some kind of power.’
She has noticed a greater interest in literary letters in recent years, and an attendant price rise. ‘I’d like to romanticize it and say, “it’s because people feel there aren’t going to be any more letters,” but I’m not sure that’s it.’ Who’s buying? Manuscript material almost always goes to institutions; inscribed books almost always go to private collectors; but correspondence can be the one middle ground. ‘If an institution has a big Don DeLillo archive they’re not going to pay a premium for six more letters. Whereas a collector of the twentieth century will pay a premium for a few Philip Roth and a few Don DeLillo.’
Is there a difference between selling a letter that has never been seen and one that has already been quoted by a biographer? ‘You get more of a bang promotionally with the unpublished one. It’s more of a brass section than a violin section.’
The purchase of archives has been buoyant since the birth of institutions built to house them, which is to say the universities in the thirteenth century. But the refined and proactive brokerage of such things is a more recent art, not least when it comes to actively ferreting out letters for sale and resale. But firms like Glenn Horowitz Bookseller are now an integral part of the chain. ‘If Texas want to get a tax benefit from the material, they need to get an appraisal done first,’ Funke Butler says. ‘And they don’t want you showing up with a suitcase full of stuff and having to deal with you. You’re probably crazy, you’re probably going to be calling them and annoying them a lot afterwards. So we provide a layer of interference for which we get a commission. A university does not want to be a retail operation. If you turn up with a suitcase here and say, “this was in my aunt’s attic” we’ll write you a cheque and you’ll walk off happy and we’ll be thrilled.’ Or, if
the firm suspects you have an attic as yet uncharted, they’ll come to you. ‘With David Foster Wallace we know who his friends and associates and colleagues were, so we can reach out to them individually and ask, “Don’t you have a few letters?” And perhaps we can then sell them to Texas to add to their archive, or we can feed off the power of the archive and sell them for more money to a private collector.’
A recent intervention pulled in quite a haul. For more than 25 years Horowitz had been in patient contact with a man in Denver, Colorado called Ed White. From 1947 to 1969, White had been in close contact with Jack Kerouac, and their correspondence spans the writer’s rambling rise and fall, with the madness that attended the publication of On the Road in 1957 pitched firmly in the middle. One letter from Kerouac, written in pencil at the beginning of September 1951, informs White that he is ‘completely rewriting the Neal-epic’, referring to Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Kerouac was in hospital in Virginia recovering from phlebitis, and the back of the letter contained fragments with a heading, torn at the corner, that reads ‘On the Ro-’. These wouldn’t make it into the published work, the ‘rewriting’ instead appearing in his subsequent novel Visions of Coady.
Jack Kerouac addresses his friend Ed White.
White had met Kerouac at Columbia University, and became a travelling companion before settling down to his career as an architect. He appears in On the Road as the character Tim Gray, and in Visions of Coady as Ed Gray, but it is a feature of the early letters in particular that White is the one encouraging Kerouac to adventure out and travel more. Kerouac also acknowledges White for encouraging him to try ‘sketching’ in his notebook as he walks the streets, which Kerouac, in a letter to Ed White in March 1965, credits with having ‘led to discovery of modern spontaneous prose’, the literary pulse of the Beats, and, in this instance at least, a modern American urban counterpart to Virginia Woolf. The whole collection, comprising 63 letters and postcards from Kerouac and some replies from White, was, on the day I visited, for sale for $1.25m.
‘I’ve work to do . . .’ Kerouac writes to Ed White with a plan for On the Road.
It is not the first time that Glenn Horowitz Bookseller has offered Kerouac letters for sale. A few years before it offered an individually priced list of 76 items, the majority unpublished, including a poem dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, a rant after the assassination of JFK, a cheque made out to Nonzie’s Wines + Liquors for $10.50 from 1961 (that was now valued at $3,500), and a set of notes written in a New York bar at the age of 22 in which he waits for a companion called Celene and sets out an early tale of woe. ‘If she does not come I shall go to a movie to postpone the anguish,’ he writes on paper headed ‘Ballantine Ale and Beer’, going on to invent a maudlin third-person narrative in which he ponders Thoreau’s dilemma, ‘how to make the getting of one’s living poetic’.
But it is the letters, to Neal Cassady and to Kerouac’s family and other friends, that flesh out a picture of the writer through key stages of his life, codifying his distorted thoughts as he bebops from disillusion to acclaim to despondency. One doesn’t have to be Beat to marvel at his bug-eyed idealism as he makes heady plans for California with Cassady and their wives in January 1951 (‘I bring mambo drums and you bring flute and we play on side of road while Joan [Haverty, Kerouac’s second wife] spreads peanut butter on bread and whatall.’) Cassady alerted him to the pitfalls of such a move from one coast to another, but Kerouac seemed possessed by the pioneering spirits of Lewis and Clark: ‘I see everything working out fine; a thousand hassles that will only be wonderful because we are taking that big trip to the coast. I feel wonderful about it . . . great, wonderful, grand, fine magnificent.’
More than any other mid-century writer, Kerouac’s letters open up to readers a sense of the vast size and opportunities of the United States; his bid to become great was linked in his mind with this spatial adventurousness. In the autumn of 1947 he wrote to his sister Caroline (whom he called Nin) of his ambitious travelling schedule, surmising ‘I’ll certainly do 90 per cent of it, I’ll have seen 41 states in all. Is that enough for an American novelist?’
But it wasn’t. Kerouac floundered, discovered that his demons travelled with him, ventured back and forth from San Francisco several times, lodged again with his mother, found Buddhism, and in 1954 wrote to Allen Ginsberg that ‘Unless I suddenly sell Beat Generation [On the Road] . . .’ the fates would forever turn against him. His new-found religion would offer some solace, but his writing ambitions had hit the rocks. ‘I am finished, I know the dream is already ended and all I see is the blur of it like in or through water and I wonder why men rush so straightforward and interested thru the fantasy.’
And then, three years later, after six years of rejection and revision, On the Road made him, overnight, the voice of a generation. In 1968 he told the Paris Review that he ‘got the idea for the spontaneous style for On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me – all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed . . . The letter he sent me is erroneously reported to be a 13,000-word letter . . . no, the 13,000-word piece was his novel The First Third, which he kept in his possession. The letter, the main letter I mean, was 40,000 words long, mind you, a whole short novel. It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better’n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves. Allen Ginsberg asked me to send him this vast letter so he could read it. He read it, then loaned it to a guy called Gerd Stern who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, in 1955, and this fellow lost the letter: overboard I presume.’*
Initially, Kerouac was euphoric with the success of On the Road. ‘Frisco is jumping’, he wrote to his latest big crush, the writer Joyce Glassman (later Joyce Johnson), on a postcard from Berkeley, California in May 1957, ‘millions of poets & jazz clubs & novelists 19 years old . . . waiting for my typewriter to write you regular letters.’ Five months later he reported to Glassman from Orlando that he had used all his penny postcards to reply to ‘ALL my fan letters’, and three months after that, ‘Have 3 new offers to make album readings, bigtime companies too’.
But the sheen faded. On the Road drew as many detractors as admirers, and Kerouac soon came to loathe the idea of heading a movement that would inevitably suffer media burn-out. His literary heroes were more permanent and more poetic: Thomas Wolfe and Rimbaud. After a six-day alcohol binge in May 1959, and the onset of severe stress and paranoia, Kerouac berates the forces that secured his reputation.* ‘It was better for our writing souls and abilities when we were obscure,’ he wrote to Allen Ginsberg. ‘I am being destroyed by wellmeaning admirers . . . they have no conception of how much they outnumber me and all their enthusiasm and mail piles up meanwhile with further demands from everywhere including insane 10,000 word letters from girls who try to write in subterranean style etc.’
But even worse, it’s the wrong sort of attention: he claims he seldom gets the credit for starting a new literary movement: ‘and Hollywood doesn’t even know I originated beat generation or that it all comes out of on the road, which they didn’t buy and won’t buy because everyone is hysterically crooked.’
Ginsberg escaped to India, and on his return secured a firm grip on the politics of the 60s. Kerouac, embittered and overwhelmed by his own creation and date-stamped talents, failed to do so. He died from complications from internal bleeding due to alcohol poisoning in 1969 at the age of 47. One may play the same poignant trick with his letters that one played with those of Virginia Woolf before her self-destruction, an exercise in glimpsed epistolary autobiography from a happier and earlier time.* For Kerouac this too takes place by the water’s edge, in one of the earliest Kerouac letters to survive, written to his sister in late summer 1941 at the age of 19. Nin was four years older than Jack, and had not joined the family when they moved briefly to New Haven, Con
necticut from Lowell, Massachusetts. But Jack wanted her to reconsider:
Oh, I tell you, it’s beautiful. Every time you look out the parlor window you can see the ocean, and sometimes the high tide splashes sprays over the sea wall across the street from our little cottage . . . I tell you Nin, this place is a resort. We look like millionaires, and what fun . . . The day we moved, I went in for a quick swim in the cove and there was a high wind. The waves were rolling in on me in great grey mountains and I was being billowed high and then low.
An important letter, punctuation perfect, some sticky imagery, typed on three leaves of paper with handwritten corrections. Yours for $17,500.
A few weeks earlier, on 8 May 1941, not quite six weeks after Virginia Woolf drowned herself, Leonard Woolf wrote again to Vita Sackville-West in reply to a request to visit her. ‘Later on I might feel I want a day or two away & then I should like to see you at Sissinghurst. At present I feel I’m better here . . . I keep on thinking how amused Virginia would have been by the extraordinary things people write to me about her.’
Many of these extraordinary things have been gathered at the Leonard Woolf archive in the Special Collections department of the University of Sussex, not far from where they lived. Reading through these condolence letters, 208 in all, one is struck not only by their starry variety (T.S. Eliot wrote, as did E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith and Osbert Sitwell and Radclyffe Hall) but by the absolute sincerity of what they say and the kindness and elegance with which they say it. There is no hint of obligation in these letters; the common themes are shock and love.
‘I have never written one like it before . . .’ The Headmaster of Charterhouse addresses Leonard Woolf.
To the Letter Page 25