Coming up for auction tomorrow at Sotherby’s, a truly rare Ginsberg item – “Siesta in Xbalba, and Return to the States”. “As Published by the Author, July 1956, near Icy Cape, Alaska, at the Sign of the Midnight Sun”, one of approximately 53 copies that Ginsberg personally mimeographed on the USNS Sgt.Jack.J.Pendleton off the coast of Alaska, a signed copy, but not just any old signed copy, this one is a presentation copy to the poem’s wise and remarkable dedicatee, Karena Shields – inscribed “For Karena Shields, with old affection + with thanks for refuge, Aug 4 1956, Wainwright, Alaska”
“Ginsberg”, the auction house notes, “embracing a sojourn of spiritual renewal and exploration, wrote Siesta in Xbalba in 1954 while staying with Shields near the Mayan ruins of Uxmal. Shields, a historian and anthropologist, had been raised in Mexico since the age of three and…had written several works on the Mayans. She invited Ginsberg to stay on her cocoa plantation during his travels and was (in the words of biographer, Barry Miles) “just the sort of person Allen needed to meet in order to see the real Mexico” . During their time together, both weathered financial instability and were essentially stuck together until Ginsberg received checks that could fund the next leg of his journey.”
(This copy) “was (a token of) Ginsberg’s appreciation for Shields’s kindness and hospitality”.
A rare and remarkable item indeed!
“On 4 August 1956, the same date as the inscription, Allen wrote to his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “Enclosed find…thirteen copies of a mimeographed pamphlet of the Mexican poem I made up here on ship last weekend. Keep one yourself and put the other dozen on sale at 50¢ each if you think you can sell them … I made up another forty and am keeping them or sending them out as whim strikes me”
50 cents – that’s a bargain! – only 5 copies of the original batch have ever made it to auction. This one – this very special signed association copy, Sotherby’s are offering with a starting bid at $6,500 – estimated $10-15,000. We anticipate it fetching, possibly, even more than that!
For more on “Siesta in Xbalba” – see here
For David S Wills‘ invaluable and definitive notes on Karena Shields, “Señora in Xbalba – Ginsberg’s Jungle Queen” – (including his pointers to her (unnamed, simply “the Señora”) in the Ginsberg-Kerouac letters – see here
