AN UNDERGROUND CLASSIC INSCRIBED TO ANNIE DELISLE. GARRETT, LESLIE. 1932-1993. The Beasts. New Y...

AN UNDERGROUND CLASSIC INSCRIBED TO ANNIE DELISLE. GARRETT, LESLIE. 1932-1993. The Beasts. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966. 8vo. Publisher's brown cloth, spine lettered in blue, publisher's printed dust jacket. Soiling to cloth, chipping and closed tears to jacket. Provenance: Anne DeLisle (presentation inscription for 'Annie McCarthy' [DeLisle]). FIRST EDITION OF GARRETT'S ONLY NOVEL, WARMLY INSCRIBED TO ANNIE DELISLE: 'For Annie McCarthy—/ My sister, my love, my friend —/ during all our lives I am sure. / Leslie Garrett / 2/79.' McCarthy had just been awarded the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and Garrett the Maxwell Perkins Prize for best first novel. As Garrett recalled, 'We were both young literary lions, circling each other, claws extended. Within five minutes, I knew that I had met a future friend. He and Annie and I were the Three Musketeers. We did a lot of carousing, a lot of champagne.' After their high life in Ibiza, however, their careers took much different paths—McCarthy becoming perhaps the most revered writer of the second half of the twentieth-century, while Garrett battled alcoholism, depression, and a suicide attempt, disappearing into obscurity. In 1973, the McCarthys rescued Garrett from Philadelphia and brought him to Knoxville, feting him with a wonderful wedding at their restored barn. By 1979, Annie was helping her old friend through a difficult divorce, and this copy was signed to her during this time. Despite Garrett's lack of literary success, scholars have noted the influence of Garrett in McCarthy's later fiction, including Child of God and Blood Meridian. Garrett did publish a second novel, In the Country of Desire, which was finally issued in 1992, the same year McCarthy made it big with All the Pretty Horses. While Garrett saw the coincidence as a long-awaited chance to join his old friend in the literary limelight, his novel unfortunately was widely disparaged, while McCarthy was celebrated. Garrett became very sick soon after, and in a kindly tone McCarthy wrote to him near the end, telling him, 'It should have been you, old friend; such honors mean nothing to me.' Copies of Garrett's award-winning first novel are scarce in any form, and particularly so in the first edition. This copy, with its warm inscription to 'Annie McCarthy' is a potent reminder of the trappings of fame, but also of McCarthy's hard work and craftsmanship over a long career. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing