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And aside from all that, life in Andulucia is quiet and good; I can manage fairly badly now in the language, and have made the acquaintance of a man of about 40 who has an eighth-grader’s light in his eyes when it comes to the Lust for Learning, English being for him the keys to the kingdom, and Spanish for me to more practical purposes, we spend occasional hours together teaching one and the other, he mightily serious about the whole project and so we do get somewhere.
And so; another letter finished—as if we could finish anything . . . another step toward wherever we are going. And I think now is a good time to recommend ‘patience’, after seeing how little good my wild dash to Madrid did. Let us move slowly and with sobre purpose?
The enclosure shows me with local friend named Eulalio, atop a mighty tower.
Love,
W.
‘deliberate hebetude’: from “East Coker,” section 2 (“hebetude” = lethargy, dullness).
King’s Park: the Kings Park Psychiatric Center on Long Island?
Capote: Truman Capote (1924–84), American novelist and journalist, had recently achieved fame with his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948).
Eulalio: Eulalio Abril Morales; see Crystal Alberts’s “Mapping William Gaddis,” p. 172n25, in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something,” ed. Alberts, Christopher Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck (McFarland, 2009). WG named a young monk after him in R (859), not to be confused with an earlier Brother Eulalio who castigated himself “for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name” (10).
WG with Eulalio Abril Morales, Madrid, 1949
To Helen Parker
[Helen Parker (1920–93) was part of the same Greenwich Village scene in the 1940s that WG came to know after leaving Harvard. They reportedly fell in love in 1946 and discussed marriage, but events of that summer caused her to change her mind. An older woman with two children (named in the letter below), she had a history of literary relations: she had been engaged to Dos Passos, knew Hemingway in Cuba, and relieved Allen Ginsberg of his virginity. She was the basis for Esther in R, which infuriated her when she read the book upon publication. In a letter to me dated 2 February 1984—by which time she was Mrs. Charles Jeremiah—she said WG hid the manuscript from her, “A bit childish since he certainly intended to publish.”]
c/o U.S. Consulate
Paseo de las Pelicias
Sevilla
18 May 49
Dear Helen.
In spite of what is apparently popular impression—judging from the lack of letters from the US—I am not at all difficult to reach by post. And just this morning I got back from Cádiz and found your letter here, forwarded from Madrid. Well. I really thought you had gone to Cuba? and so haven’t written—that was the last word I had from you, you know—a card-in-an-envelop saying Cuba. And so haven’t sent you even so much as a picture postal. And I am sorry you didn’t go, if you wanted to go—though I don’t see how Cuba could last; except perhaps for Mr. Hemingway.
As for Spain—it has only become Spain since I got out of Madrid a couple of months ago. My winter there was as low as anybody’s anywhere—with little company but Mr. Eliot—who isn’t disposed to cheer one up. Then in March I went briefly to a Franciscan monastery: and though I left quite unbeatified, somehow since then everything has come along well. Not everything of course—but nearer so than it has ever been my experience.
Right now, for instance—I have just returned with less than 1¢ worth of Spanish money in my pocket. But damn it in a place like Sevilla I can’t care—into a favourite bar (there are many) where the friendly proprietor has delivered to me some fine glasses of Jerez wine—and back to my pension, where I will be fed and bedded until the sun comes up. Have encountered a young engineer, “of fine family,” who is going to the US soon to study & wants some English lessons—there a small source of income—and so it goes.
And so for immediacies I couldn’t care less somehow—such as sitting over a bucket full of linen (it is soaking—looks enough for a circus tent) which I bought in better days, and now haven’t the money to have a suit made—though with another glass or two of Jerez could make it myself; my only troubles being over work, which has lagged badly recently—though I could hardly tell where the days have gone. I don’t know—I am almost content for the first time in my life. Though heaven knows, it won’t last.
Did you ever meet Barney Emmart? He is studying at London University now—and we have been exchanging prospective plans for summer; because he is as interested in—and tremendously better posted on—the things that have been occupying me recently—most epitomized in the book of Robert Graves, The White Goddess, which has really got me going. And so some possibility that I go to England, if I can manage, and spend some time walking the Druid country. I don’t know yet about Jake—he and I are still in the toils of mails. Though he sounds splendidly settled with Nance. And a letter from Bernie, on some Italian island with Auden, Capote, and an assortment of 9$-bills—I still want to see and talk with Bernie, old friend—but not at that price ——And a chance that next winter I may go to Africa to work (not act) for a Spanish motion-picture company. A chance.
And if all this sounds ideal—it isn’t: but is the nearest I have known on this earth. Largely perhaps because it is so long since I have seen anyone I know—or had opportunity to speak my language—and so hopes mount up, again—for what will be a real disillusion if it comes. And the price paid in loneliness. And I suppose one day the bullfights will wear out, and the wine, and the usual shrug of casual temptations—and so I follow this hunger now.
There will be time. Life is very long.—I shall write better soon; meanwhile love to you, and Bruce, and Tommy—and do write me again, lengthier, about the things I only find hinted in your letter.
W
There will be time: a line from Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As noted earlier, “Life is very long” is from his “The Hollow Men.”
Bruce, and Tommy: Helen Parker’s children from an earlier marriage, aged five and ten.
To Edith Gaddis
Sevilla
28 May, 49
Fair stood the wind for France . . .
Well, fair or not, that is where I am going any day now. And I suppose that we are in for a Royal disaster, involving misdirected mail, pennies lost down the drain, imprisonment for illegal entry of wild flowers, heaven knows what.
A moment of lucidity: Immediately you receive this letter, send no more mail to Sevilla; to Madrid instead.
At present planned: to leave here about the 7th of June, for Madrid. To leave Madrid about the 12th of June, for points north. I should like, if I can afford it, to stop over at a town or two in the north of Spain before going on to France; if I can’t shall go right along to Paris D.V.
I believe I have enough money to manage it—though if I should receive a Jackson from you before moving on it will be welcome. Therefore: if you will send to this Paris address, to be there around the 15th of June, or a few days before, any kind of negotiable check for 50$: c/o American Express [¶] 11, Rue Scribe, Paris France., and if I arrive penniless, as I most certainly shall, I can, with Jake’s help, get straightened out. Also: have cashed the Bilbao check.
I wonder: did you ever get around to sending that medicine, for my pension master in Madrid, that I asked for in the US-mailed letter?
Looking at the calendar, there is apparently hardly more than time for a letter from you at Madrid, answering this one—though send nothing in it in the way of $, cheques, gold-pieces, &c. Greetings and God-speed will suffice.
That seems to be all at the moment; must write Jake, from whom I have just had a letter, warning him of the Thing that will soon appear on his horizon—garbed in a linen toga, wild-eyed, and hempen sandals, with pockets full of oranges, —the lost Iberian.
love to you,
W
Fair stood the wind for France: the opening line of Michael Drayton’s “To the Cambro-Britions and Their Harp, Hi
s Ballad of Agincourt” (1619).
Jackson: their code for a $20 bill.
To Edith Gaddis
[WG spent the next year and a half in Paris, which is satirized in the second chapter of R.]
Paris
17 June 49
dear Mother,
No doubt about it, Paris is a beautiful city. And everything is somehow pleasanter than I expected. Nothing to be alarmed about. I was apparently very fortunate to get a hotel room, they being about as difficult to come on as in NY; but met in the train from Madrid a very nice Spanish gentleman, who had the whole Spanish lack of respect for things French (a mutual attitutude), and, I think somewhat alarmed that this young American would find France nicer than Spain, outdid himself in niceties, finally recommending me to a friend of his here, a hotel-keeper. And so I am, and on the Right Bank (the Left Bank being you know the traditional home of Bohemian high-jinks &c). Still having monstrous difficulties with the language, Spanish is all I can speak, blubbering and yammering.
But the city, in spite of the fact that it [is] not architecturally anything remarkable—Notre Dame for instance is not at all as magnificent as Christmas-card engravings have led us to believe—is impressive in its endless vistas, boulevards and avenues of great width, always terminating in some sort of well-known construction. And so in spite of the familiarity of the Arc de Triumphe, the Eiffel Tower &c, all these things are wonderful because of the way they are presented. Unlike most cities I have seen (and notably NY) Paris is less impressive when seen from an elevation. NY for instance is nothing until you get up 102 storeys and look down on it; Paris from the top of the Arch is simply a table-top of dull house-rooves, because of the fairly consistent height of the buildings, they are all about 7 storeys. But the city radiating out around you as you stand in the Champs Elysees, or along the Seine, is beautiful. (And after all a city is to be lived in on the ground, or is it.) And along the Seine at 5am remarkably beautiful.
I have seen Jake, and he looks wonderfully well, in good spirits and healthy, working at his school where he will be through in a few weeks and on translations, in general very fine. Just now he and I are trying to work out the summer plans, may involve going to an inexpensive country place near Tours, south of Paris, quite undecided as yet. But here was Jacob, perfectly: after we had not encountered for something like 2 years, and of course there were thousands of words to exchange, things to go over, cultures to compare &c &c, the evening of our meeting (and both of us grinning like idiots on the first encounter, with pleasure) Mr Bean proposes that we attend a performance of some Beethoven quartets, which we did. Well.
And then, if all sounds too healthy to be bearable, I shall go on to say that last evening there arrived from Florence Italy the paralytic Mr Bubu Faulkner, drink being the agency of his paralysis. Dear heaven, how he can keep it up. At any rate we went over to the left bank, where generations of odd people have congregated, and there I participated briefly in what Miss Williams called the imitation of Greenwich Village, and since Gr Vil is a traditional imitation of the left bank . . . boring to me, bored to extinction, the flowers of evil indeed. The whole thing rather pathetic, seeing French police loading American lily-boys into a van, and really quite foolish. And so I continue to enjoy Paris from the river’s bourgeois side.
One thing remarkable after the desert of Spain is to find here such unlimited publications, books, reviews, and theatre, and concerts, &c. But even so I am still attached south of the Pyrenees, Spain has more to do with me, or for me, than here. Paris is, needless to say, more expensive on all counts. But there are aspects that are almost provincial after Spain; for instance, one must eat lunch between 12 and 1:30, while Madrid’s lunch hour is 2 at earliest. And you can’t dine after 9 (I suppose Maxims and Fouquets serve, haven’t investigated), in all that they are like nice respectable French farmers. And by 11 the city seems to have retired, while Madrid’s theatre starts at 11, and you really can’t be seen at night spots before 1. Well. I am quite pleased to find it so innocent.
For other plans, I don’t know. Bernie is to arrive here in a few days, but somehow I don’t think, after the initial greetings, we’ll have much to do. The pleasures and pastimes he has adopted in the last year don’t appeal even slightly to me, nor the company, most of whom seem to be appearing. And then for Barney, another uncertainty. Paris, I understand, is something he can’t cope with. And heaven knows I don’t want to see any human disasters just now. But shall write him and see what he ‘plans’. And there is Miss Williams, still on the Riviera and half-planning to come up here, hope to see her but don’t manage such a trip just now. [...]
One oclock, I had best get out and look for a small restaurant, or shall be caught lunchless in this provincial town.
with love,
W
BuBu Faulkner: Robert Eames Faulkner III (1913–86); after working for the New Yorker in the 1930s and serving during World War II, he led a bohemian life in Europe and North Africa.
imitation of Greenwich Village [...] imitation of the left bank: In R, Ed Feasley complains, “—I haven’t been in Paris since I was seven years old, Chrahst to go there now! I mean to Saint Germain des Prés where they’re imitating Greenwich Village and here we are in Greenwich Village still imitating Montmartre” (746).
the flowers of evil: Les Fleurs du mal (1957), Charles Baudelaire’s best-known book of poetry.
To Edith Gaddis
(American Express) [Paris]
[3 July 1949]
dear Mother.
Here we are, 6 of us at noon sitting before a small café, all over the sidewalk—Bernie, Jake, and an interesting assortment—and I realise—have for some days—that it is long since I wrote. Things have been “active”—having just gone down to Nice, Cannes &c—found Miss Margaret Williams, and brought her back to Paris. Well. By now I am so mixed up. Quite uncertain about the summer, about Miss Williams, about everything in sight. And of course in the expected desperate state about money. ——Knowing this letter sounds distracted (it is hardly the propitious circumstance for letter-writing) but I am “well”—Also to say I had the sad news of Grunter, wrote you another and unmailed letter—and just now of Chas. Hall, whom I may manage to see if I can find a clean shirt—
love,
W.
To Edith Gaddis
American Express
11, Rue Scribe
Paris France
9 July 49.
dear Mother,
I have just dropped two suitcase keys out of my 7th-storey hotel window; and that trifle may go to illustrate pretty much how things have been going for the last weeks.
Many enough competences have attacked the sempiternal picture of ingrate children, sons and lovers. And here the son, moored high among a floating campanella, faëry bells that pass unattached, tangled among treetops, bleeding their sounds in drops over the green, through the light, indifferent calling signalling only the mariner who reasons to fear the shoals, we others reach out, call back answerless, until there and sudden is the white water and we know what they knew—Seated, as I say, on a level of treetops in an anonymous section of Paris, adding the days I have written you nothing (where the dark of the days and the hours reigned in glowing incautious confusion) (new ribbon)
(“and that one”, said an old engineer, “has bananas in his head . . .”) History being a temporal substitute for creation, I suppose we may best recline to chronology, to rely like the weak on arrangement, on the varicose strands of time. Conveniently with each day numbered, respectfully submitting to a larger number that Pope Gregory, forced to temporal attentions, restricted as a year, thinking perhaps that any christian concept of eternity merited science’s corresponding resolution to infinity, that was numbers. Or Evangeline, retching in the forest primeval —life is very long.
But no. Better, —It was roses, roses all the way, and never a sprig of yew . . . And better to go backwards; starting at last night.
The Paris Opera. We went, I t
ook Margaret, to the ballet at the Paris Opera, largely because it is Paris, because she is Margaret, and we are both, wolens-nolens, in Paris. And so we sat, at aristocratic attention, inclining toward the stage or toward one another to comment, seated in armchairs, suspended darkly over the ostentation of the multitude; and there they danced to undistinguished music and polite applause—who? an American? shouted bis! bis! not because it was grand or even particularly good, but because we need spectacles, because the only ones who afford the grand gesture today usually end up in the prison or the asylum, so well-conducted is our sterility, so well-rewarded our antisepsis,
(Well, and it was graceful of them, they’d break talk off and afford,
(She to touch her mask’s black velvet, he to finger at his sword,
(While you sat and played tocattas, stately at the clavichord . . .)
Words drop, disappear, or shamefully retreat from our vocabularies. And that word cried in a desert on desert air, that was Disaster. Because now, a meticulous unfolding seems to be going on. The day before, we (of whom the sustaining concomitant is Margaret) went as his guests to Mr Bean’s country school, where we lunched in a cafe garden, and were so pleasant together that one has a sudden moment of stricken silence to say, these are the moments we have waited for, and paid for before and after, passionless and un-looked-for. Or we have suppered at a student restaurant, or among intellectuals talking of foolishness, or fools parading their mis-information, or walked near the Seine and beside it, or walked among people like a walk in the forest over dead leaves where they crush under quick steps refuse of nature, used, old junk, dust returning, back to the button-moulder, helpless before life.
All of which is to say, that, although confusion has never reigned so brilliantly, there would seem to be immanent crossroads: though that is a pitifully incompetent metaphor: not crossroads, but something like that clover-leaf highway arrangement on the Henry Hudson parkway; where, if you remember, we spent the better part of an afternoon thundering in misdirections, and were finally resolved on the way we were going, for better or worse, toward home or away from it, I cannot remember.