force behind E. M. Forster’s famous maxim is as pressing today as when he first expressed it in Howard’s End over a century ago: “Only connect!
We have found space for several other Beat relics, the most impressive being an archive of Neal Cassady letters sent from reformatory school to an early mentor, shedding light on his past as “a young jailkid shrouded in mystery” (as Kerouac would later mythologize him). My favourite, however, is the 1943 yearbook from a high school in Paterson, New Jersey, inscribed by each of its graduating classmates, including a young Allen Ginsberg whose entry declares him “the philosopher and genius of the class ... fiend for Beethoven and Charlie Chaplin … hates dull teachers and Republicans”. Of all the connections we may experience, and of which books may tell, the greatest of these is love. Nancy Cunard’s ground-breaking Negro Anthology i s here in the most significant and moving copy imaginable: the dedication copy, inscribed to her lover, the jazz musician Henry Crowder who inspired the book, and on reading it, noted “you have made the name Cunard stand for more than ships”. For further amorous frisson, look for the copy of Madame Bovary inscribed by Flaubert to his childhood crush, or Siegfried Sassoon presenting his Memoirs to his temperamental lover Stephen Tennant. Other pieces are almost unbearably poignant: A Passage to India inscribed “my mother’s copy” by Forster when he took possession of it after her death, and a love letter from Sylvia Plath to Ted Hughes, stained with tears and steeped in “a deep sense of terror”. Perhaps most of all Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre , his fighter-pilot memoir of the war in which he was to lose his life, inscribed on his last meeting with the woman who had inspired many details of Le Petit Prince : she was the fox, her poodle the sheep, and her doll the Little Prince himself. I could go on. These, in short, are the sort of books I love, and it is a privilege to be involved, albeit briefly, in their ongoing stories: each waiting only to make a new connection with you.
That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height . Live in fragments no longer”. Especially in today’s hyper-connected, lonely world, the quest to connect remains essential in life, as in literature. The stories of connection revealed in presentations between fellow authors and friends, or in examples of meaningful readership, impart an irreplaceable value to the objects themselves and, I believe, to their pursuit. This catalogue gathers many exciting examples of literary connection, each a gateway to a unique story, part of that indispensable alchemy by which we “connect the prose and the passion”. We have presentation copies between authors who need no introduction: from Edith Wharton to Henry James, equal titans of the literary elite on both sides of the Atlantic, or from Ian Fleming to Noël Coward, who had in his latest novel depicted the James Bond author as a tropical island-dwelling lothario. It is a special thrill to find presentation copies of major texts one seldom sees inscribed, such as Joseph Conrad’s Youth , including “Heart of Darkness”, inscribed to a fellow author who shared his Polish roots. A Christmas Carol is inscribed to a young lady with whose family Dickens stayed with when he gave the story its first public reading in Birmingham. Our recently discovered copy of The Waste Land has a wonderful international association, inscribed to Victoria Ocampo, doyenne of literary South America. Sometimes the connection between reader and book tells its own story. A knockout example is the copy of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale , owned by a teenage James Joyce when he was still a Dublin student, which provided the blueprint for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Neal Cassady’s pocket Bible, given to him by his wife Carolyn with passages underlined urging him to “shun profane and vain babblings” and “flee also youthful lusts”, is another.
Sammy Jay sammy@peterharrington.co.uk
Design: Nigel Bents & Abbie Ingleby Photography: Ruth Segarra Rear cover image of Sammy Jay: Abbie Ingleby
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