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by Gaddis, William

  This intervention by Tom Jenkins was indeed a happy accident (though, to exhaust the above, there are no accidents in Interpol), and I was highly entertained by the page-in-the-typewriter in your Epitaph for a Tramp. I of course had to go back and find the context (properly left-handed), then back to the beginning to find the context of the context, and finally through to the end and your fine cool dialogue (monologue) which I envied and realised how far all that had come since ’51 & 2, how refined from such crudities as ‘Daddy-o, up in thy way-out pad . . .’ And it being the only ‘cop story’ (phrase via Tom Jenkins) or maybe 2nd or 3rd that I’ve read, had a fine time with it. (And not that you’d entered it as a Great Book; but great God! have you seen the writing in such things as Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder? Can one ever cease to be appalled at how little is asked?)

  I should add I am somewhat stirred at the moment regarding the possibility of being exhumed in paperback, one of the ‘better’ houses (Meridian) has apparently made an offer to Harcourt Brace, who since they brought it out surreptitiously in ’55 have seemed quite content to leave it lay where Jesus flung it, but now I gather begin to suspect that they have something of value and are going to be quite as brave as the dog in the manger about protecting it. Though they may surprise me by doing the decent and I should not anticipate their depravity so high-handedly I suppose. Very little money involved but publication (in the real sense of the word) which might be welcome novelty.

  And to really wring the throat of absurdity—having found publishers a razor’s edge tribe between phoniness and dishonesty—I have been working on a play, a presently overlong and overcomplicated and really quite straight figment of the Civil War: publishers almost shine in comparison to the show-business staples, as ‘I never read anything over 100 pages’ or, hefting the script, (without opening it), ‘Too long’. The consummate annoyance though being that gap between reading the press (publicity) interview-profile of a currently successful Broadway director whose lament over the difficulty of getting hold of ‘plays of ideas’ simply rings in one’s head as one’s agent, having struggled through it, shakes his head in baleful awe and delivers the hopeless compliment, ‘. . . but it’s a play of ideas’ —a real escape hatch for everybody in the ‘game’ (a felicitous word) whose one idea coming and going is $. And I’m behaving as though all this is news to me.

  Incidentally—or rather not incidentally at all, quite hungrily—Jenkins mentioned from a letter of yours a most provocative phrase from a comment by Malcolm Lowry on The Recognitions which whetted my paranoid appetite, I am most curious to know what he might have said about it (or rather what he did say about it, with any thorns left on). I cannot say I read his book which came out when I was in Mexico, 1947 as I remember, and I started it, found it coming both too close to home and too far from what I thought I was trying to do, and lost or had it lifted from me before I ever resolved things. (Yes, in my case one of the books that the book-club ads blackmail the vacuum with ‘Have you caught yourself saying Yes, I’ve been meaning to read it. . . .’ (they mean Exodus).) But I am picking up a copy for a new look. Good luck on your current obsession.

  with best regards,

  W. Gaddis

  Dr Weisgall: a dentist in R who receives several unwanted letters from Agnes Deigh after she mistakenly reports him to the police.

  letterhead: Pfizer International.

  the perfect book as, inevitably, the perfect crime: in R, an art critic quotes the French painter Edgar Degas’s remark “that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed” (71).

  ‘the people [...] gas bill’: R 386.

  ‘Daddy-o [...] pad’: a beatnik version of the Paternoster appears in R (536).

  Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder: best-sellers of the time: Exodus (1958) was by Leon Uris, Anatomy of a Murder (1958) by Robert Traver.

  leave it lay where Jesus flung it: an old saying WG occasionally uses (later ascribed to a woman).

  Lowry on The Recognitions: Markson sent Lowry a copy of R in 1956; see below for Lowry’s response.

  WG with David Markson, New York, 1964.

  Edith Gaddis at Massapequa, early 1960s. (Photo by Curtis Reider.)

  To Robert M. Ockene

  [Apparently an editorial assistant at Meridian Books at this time. Ockene later became an editor at Bobbs-Merrill; his enthusiasm for R is described by Victor S. Navasky in “Notes on the Underground,” New York Times Book Review, 5 June 1966, 3.]

  [New York City

  15 March 1961]

  From a letter from a fellow named David Markson in Mexico, an early admirer of The Recognitions, and at this point I suppose simply For Your Information since Harcourt is still sitting on that ‘modest’ offer, figuring I suppose that they may have something after all. Have you seen Mr Jovanovich’s little New Year book Now, Barabbas? Curiouser & Curiouser, Inc.

  Yours

  WG

  [The enclosure is Markson’s transcription of a letter to him from Malcolm Lowry dated 22 February 1957; the bracketed interpolations are Markson’s. The letter was eventually published in Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, vol. 2: 1946–1957, ed. Sherrill E. Grace (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), 875ff.]

  My very dear old Dave: It is quite unforgivable of me not to have replied before, especially when I had so much to thank you for: but this was paradoxically the reason, first William Gaddis’ The Recognitions isn’t exactly the kind of book (a veritable Katchen Junga, you know the Mountain I mean anyhow, of a book, the ascent of some overhangs of which can scarcely be made safely without the assistance, one feels, of both Tanzing and Aleister Crowley) possible to return figuratively or in fact the next day, as happened once with Ulysses, with the comment, ‘Very good!’ I’d wanted both to thank you for this and write something intelligent upon it worthy of the book in the bargain. . . . [I’m cutting several lines here, re other news of his own—about the Vintage edition of Volcano, by the way] . . . I’d been working so hard I’d forgotten I’d received any [news] and for the same reason I have not yet finished The Recognitions (which was delayed incidentally by the Christmas mails and The Demon Oleum—that word is Oleum—oil anyway perhaps): what I can say is that it is probably all you claim for it, a truly fabulous creation, a SuperByzantine Gazebo and secret Missile of the Soul and likewise extraordinarily funny: much funnier than Burton (who has me gathering borage out of the garden to heal the melancholy his laughter induces, also a spoonful of vinegar at bedtime helps) though Burton’s a good parallel. I can only read a little at a time, however, because I have to watch my eyesight, which begins to get strained round midnight after having spent the day since 7:30 a.m. scratching out the previous day’s work; so that it may be somewhile yet before I can give you a full report on The Recognitions; . . .

  [Markson ends there and points out that Lowry died a few months later, never making that full report.]

  Now, Barabbas: a sixteen-page essay in booklet form by the president of WG’s publishing house, William Jovanovich (1920–2001)—whose surname WG consistently misspells “Jovanovitch” in later letters—concerning “the propensities of publishers,” issued in 1960 “in a limited edition as a New Year’s greeting to friends of Harcourt, Brace & World” (1). “Curiouser and curiouser” is Alice’s comment on events in Wonderland.

  Tanzing and Aleister Crowley: Tenzing Norgay (and Sir Edmund Hillary) ascended Mount Everest (Chomolungma in Tibetan) in 1953; Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was a notorious English magician who wrote many books on the occult.

  Burton: Robert Burton (1577–1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

  To Aaron Asher

  [An editor (1929–2008) then at World Publishing Company, whose trade paperback line, Meridian Books, would reissue R in March 1962. David Markson was the one who brought R to Asher’s attention. The corrections mentioned were separated from the letter by the time I saw it.]

  New York City

 
15 April 1961

  Aaron Asher: Here are the corrections Jack Green and I have dug up in The Recognitions. Let me know if you have any questions on them. Also your progress in garnering ‘names’ to send (what amount to) pre-publication copies to. (Si Krim knows a painter who has known Alexander King for 30 years, still a good bet I think.) And let me know when you’ve worked it out what arrangement you would propose for an English edition. (What are your connections like at Faber?) And any other news.

  Yours,

  W. Gaddis

  Si Krim: Seymour Krim (1922–89), a literary journalist and magazine editor.

  Alexander King: Austrian-born American artist, editor (at Life), and TV personality (1900–1965), author of several volumes of somewhat scandalous memoirs.

  To Charles Monaghan

  [While in England Monaghan had spoken with Timothy O’Keeffe (whose name WG often misspells) of MacGibbon & Kee about the possibility of publishing R and apparently also spoke with WG’s U.S. publisher William Jovanovich—whom Monaghan called Joe Vanovich, to WG’s amusement—about some sort of co-production arrangement.]

  New York 3 NY

  4 May 1961

  dear Charles Monaghan.

  I greatly appreciate your stirring interest in English publication possibilities for The Recognitions, it could hardly be more timely. Cost is the thing that has kept British publishers from it till now; but this may be largely mitigated by a recent development happy on other counts. Meridian paperbacks is to bring it out here around the end of the year or beginning of next, and we’ve talked of their having a press run larger than their own needs for this printing and selling by prearrangement the balance as sheets to a British publisher for publication there, which seems to me a fine possibility, since it would not have to be brought out there at the suicidal price it was here originally.

  There was a British publication scheduled long ago by Secker & Warburg, by contract with the bogus Mr Fred Warburg in I believe Oct ’54, he convinced himself and his associates that he had the new American Ulysses, ran into some difficulties with Eng printers (‘obscene’) and used that as an excuse to back out of the contract 5 days before the book was surreptitiously released by Harcourt Brace here, when he’d learned, that is, that it was not going to be hailed on the front page of the NYT Book Review &c, tried to get me to cut it with embarrassing preachings on the ‘Artist’s duty’ &c no mention of cutting obscenities, he was suddenly scared of costs, very shabby the whole performance and of course he’d sat on it with his contract those 6 prepublication months when another British publisher of more integrity might have taken it. Forgive the spleen, but this has been rankling a long time, aggravated by that phony bastard’s poses later as a champion of literary freedom &c who’d been done out of his greatness by archaic British law.

  At any rate a British firm is looking at it now with an eye to the abovementioned possibility with Meridian and I have to put off any other possibility waiting to hear what sort of terms they will offer. MacGibbon & Kee was curiously on my list for possible places to show it with this new possibility and T O’Keefe’s name had been given me by one of few straight people in publishing here; but for the moment as I say waiting on word from this other firm, and though I have a few copies of the book hoarded am in no position to intercede with Joe Vanovitch (very nice; did you see his New Years’ ‘book’ Now Barabbas, very high flown Duties Of The Publisher jazz), they treat me rather like a posthumous author now and I wouldn’t ask them for air in a jug. The man to reach at this point I think is Aaron Asher at Meridian (now part of World Publishing Company, 119 West 57 street NYC 19), if O’Keefe wants to write him.

  Many thanks again, by heaven the boil will bust eventually. I so greatly envy you London, 2 visits convinced me (10 years ago) it and the people the only place that makes sense for me; but supporting a wife-and-two on Fleet street pay . . . I’m too old I guess to dare it now.

  Yours with best regards,

  W. Gaddis

  T O’Keefe: Timothy O’Keeffe (1926–14) is best known for rediscovering Flann O’Brien: he reprinted O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds in 1959 and encouraged the Irish author to resume writing.

  To David Markson

  New York 3 N.Y.

  5 May 1961

  dear David Markson.

  The secret police have done their work well—to date: Aaron Asher is bringing The Recognitions out in paper around the end of the year or beginning of next, probably at around $250, at last we can let the riff-raff in. A great relief to me though you may imagine the amount of money that changed hands was comically small (hands being Meridian-Harcourt of course—my share should, once Harcourt has taken out a long dead advance, be the price of a dinner, the whole thing has been a real parody of the beggar Shacabac at Barmecide’s feast). But it may also prefigure English publication which—again, money aside—should carry its own reward.

  Thanks for the new Epitaph—I haven’t read it but it has started my wife off on a spree of mystery story reading which may be salutary. Otherwise peace reigns relentlessly.

  Yours,

  W. Gaddis

  Barmecide’s feast: a tale from the Thousand and One Nights in which a prince of the Barmecide family in Baghdad spreads an imaginary feast for a beggar for sport. A “Barmecide’s feast” is therefore a nonexistent or negligible offering.

  let the riff-raff in: Gaddis ascribes a version of this remark to Fred Allen in his letter of 19 August 1973 to John Leverence.

  new Epitaph: Markson published his second detective novel, Epitaph for a Dead Beat, in 1961. Both were reprinted in a single volume by Shoemaker & Hoard in 2007.

  To Charles Socarides

  [Croton-on-Hudson, NY]

  2 June 1961

  Dear Charlie,

  As a doctor you will see these explanations as mere manifestations of the lunatic norm, as a friend you must see them as attempts at apology for what has certainly appeared as rudeness, thoughtlessness, lack of interest in your proposal. But on every hand in the past year or so a despair of indecision has set in to a point of paralysis of the will, each indecision feeding the others, from writing to the job to moving to school for the children back to writing, a play of my own unfinished, a commissioned article scarcely begun, an overwhelming conviction of lack of competence, talent &c., unable to say a decisive yes but afraid to say no, afraid of missing the main chance, —“We spend our lives waiting for something to happen (says H G Wells) and then . . . it doesn’t happen.” Ecco.

  Make it happen? This is where the paralysis of the will enters, but grounded in this case on more realistic considerations, as, the current deplorable state of Broadway theatre (as business, not art); and the severe (‘agonizing’) reappraisal of my own play-writing talents that followed on 1½ year’s intensive even enraptured work on a play which, until I finished it and reread it, seemed to me quite great. Now it reads heavy-handed, obvious, over-explained, oppressive, —there is a play in the work I’ve done but the vital problem remains, to extract it, to lift out something with a life of its own, give it wings, release it (this kind of block I think you know already medically, a kind of constipation of resentful satisfaction). And I go on like this here not (doctor) to parade psychical commonplaces, but (friend) only to say, somehow, why the show of lack of interest, why the rudeness, the neither yes nor no on the ‘Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl’. I did read both books, I did have difficulty casting it up in my mind as a scene-by-scene suspenseful development in any but a predictable direction, I did try to think but what I believe I did not do (in light of all the above) was to turn it loose in my mind, let it come alive with its own life, and whether I am capable of this, whether I have been fair to it, myself or you, I do not know, but I doubt.

  Here again is an elemental consideration: the story of the girl, and as I understand your interest in it, is a positive affair, there is a cure &c, this by logical dramatic inference to say that life, the whole proposition, is so; whereas I feel fundamentally it�
�s not, there is no cure but the final one, the only redemption is well-contested failure: so much for fundamental feelings; the practical ones involve simply professional competence and Charlie I’ve no reason to believe I have it.

  Already (in the arts) I look back on too many false hopes fragmented, lost; by circumstance, by definition almost, I’ve forced my family to share them; should I, with a hope-against-hope, desperate-for-time, escape-inflated yes to your proposal, ask you to share yet another one? and in terms of money as earnest of your own enthusiastic confidence? Oh, if only I were really streaked with the confidence-man stripe of the real artist, but the same New England chill blows over that that chills the art itself.