B007RT1UH4 EBOK

by Gaddis, William

  If you are not yourself overcome with doubt at this point over this invitation, and if I am not so late in answering as to upset your schedule, would you let me know in a little more detail what sort of group? and how large? and a date as late this year as you can conveniently manage, the December possibility you note so that I can arrange some notion of what I am doing if only to myself. I do regard your invitation most highly, and again will understand completely if at this point you can no longer conveniently extend it.

  To Alice Denham

  [A fiction writer and model (1933– ), and a former Playboy centerfold (the July 1956 issue, which also included a short story by her). David Markson introduced her to WG, who had separated from his wife by then, though their divorce would not be finalized until 16 May 1967. The following letter appears in her memoir Sleeping with Bad Boys: Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties (Book Republic Press, 2006), in the chapter “A Week with Willie Gaddis.”]

  Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

  [30 September 1965]

  Dear Alice,

  In one recent evening I ‘direct dialed’ 4 numbers, 3 in N.Y. and yours in Washington—and got a service on each one of them. So much for the telephone company.

  My own household has finally collapsed, my effort of the past 2 years to hold it together unavailing & Pat moved out with the children & so now the long bloody scene involving lawyers, my demands for ‘rights’ regarding children etc., none of it new but all of it new to me and to them and seeming so damned unnecessary, aren’t there enough problems without adding new ones?

  And regarding books, writing—the second book seems scarcely easier than the first, harder really—God save us from the 3rd!—but I have a good publishing contract now and so no need for other work.

  Are you ever in New York? Let me know.

  Yours,

  W. Gaddis

  To David Markson

  [Markson published his first “serious” novel—his three earlier ones were written for money—in early 1966, entitled The Ballad of Dingus Magee. The specific review Markson sent WG is unknown.]

  [February? 1966]

  Dear David—

  As stupid & cynical as it may sound, may be, I hope you’ll understand my congratulations on a review and not the book itself, at this point anyhow—but that review, in that “influential organ”, well—I’m sure I am interrupting a ’phone call from Joe Levine or Daryl Zanuck (not Harry Joe Brown jr), I hope so at any rate, and the book itself will follow quite separately, though I guess my real congratulations are on finishing it, and on, apparently, keeping your sense of humour. Thanks for sending the review, I’ll buy the book.

  Yours,

  W Gaddis

  Levine [...] Zanuck: Joseph E. Levine (1905–87) and Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–79) were prominent film producers of the time.

  Harry Joe Brown jr: film producer (1934–2005); cf. WG’s postcard to Markson of 5 October 1989.

  WG at the beach at Saltaire, Long Island, mid-1960s.

  The house at Saltaire (photo by WG).

  To David Markson

  [Markson sold film rights to Dingus Magee for $100,000 (equivalent to $700,000 today), which allowed him and his family to go to Europe for a few years.]

  7 March 1966

  David—my response (prompt as always) to your splendid piece of news which anyone who knows you can be delighted at, knowing that you know where it fits in the scheme of things (“Jimmy Breslin” notwithstanding) and how to make sense of/with it.

  (Do you recall some time ago sending me a carbon of a letter to a publisher w/ the superscription “Doesn’t anyone care?”—well this experience should prove in the very best sense that no one does, and)—what is the line? —“Not fare well, but fare forward”—

  best regards all round

  W. Gaddis.

  Jimmy Breslin: popular New York columnist and author (1930– ). “Not fare well, but fare forward”: from the end of part 3 of Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages.”

  To Judith Thompson

  [WG’s future second wife (1940– )—they would marry in June 1968—whom he met in 1965 via his friend Mike Gladstone. She was Associate Travel Editor for Glamour at the time, and later freelanced and worked in the antiques business.]

  3 August 1966

  How strange this is the first ‘letter’ I have ever written you, & can’t begin “Dear Judith” with a straight face, dear girl, dear Judith, dear heaven how long ago only this time yesterday already has become.

  And you may imagine how much news there is here since our telephone call—and how you haunt this house—and that downstairs room where I hope to move tonight if the children can be persuaded to move into theirs, Sarah quite entranced with hers, mirrored dresser &c—and how this letter is merely a device to see if mail really works between here and there, and so you will have something in the mail, and know I have mounted a pencil sharpener on a kitchen wall and once more spread out work.

  And to tell you you must call, wire, come, if things, pressures, get too disproportionate won’t you—including $ (and use the enclosed just to keep you in balance until I see you)—though for the moment 2 days’ a week work may not be unrealistic, may allow you a little more freedom at home—the horoscopes keep insisting how splendid everything is for us, and that means work I guess, you to fight off the difficulties in your situation there, toward work; I to fight off the attractions in mine here, toward work; and toward seeing you Sunday night, barring disaster.

  yours, with you know what and you know why

  W.

  Judith Gaddis and WG, Saltaire, late 1960s.

  To Carolyn Kizer

  [American poet (1925– ) who in 1966 became the first director of Literary Programs for the newly created National Endowment for the Arts. The paragraph below WG’s signature was apparently typed on a carbon of his “official” letter of acceptance.]

  Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. 10520

  [late 1966]

  Dear Miss Kizer.

  You may imagine I am immensely gratified at being among the writers awarded grants in literature by the National Endowment for the Arts, and will be more than pleased to make reports as requested on my progress on this work which I can now hope to complete with the assistance of this grant.

  Although some years have already gone into this work-in-progress it is, as I think often chronic among writers, behind the schedule I had originally intended for it; and my work on it this spring will be sporadically interrupted by a part-time teaching invitation which I had accepted in order to continue work on the book. I trust this will not affect the provisions and administering of the grant as set forth in Mr Stevens’ letter, but should it appear to the payment dates of the grant might be moved ahead from the present January-April-July-October 1967, to July-October (1967)-January-April (1968).

  In any case, since the work-in-progress is taking me longer than intended, be assured that the grant funds will be used in the manner and for the purpose set forth, as indicated by the enclosed carbon which I have signed with great gratitude.

  Yours,

  William Gaddis

  Carolyn —as you can see from this letter I decided that it might make more sense simply to accept the grant as proposed, but felt the part-time teaching item should be mentioned to keep the record clear and avoid gross complications, as it were. I hope this makes sense to you and that you can proceed, without further concern for my confusions, with things as they stand in Mr Stevens’ letter. Do let me know, I earnestly hope I haven’t injected my own uncertainties which are now largely resolved. & now: to ‘work apace, apace, apace. /Honest labour bears a lovely face.’

  Mr. Stevens: Roger L. Stevens (1910–98), a theater producer and the first chairman of the National Edowment for the Arts.

  ‘work apace [...] lovely face’: from Thomas Dekker’s 1599 play Patient Grissil (ODQ).

  To Jack P. Dalton

  [See 27 September 1963. After Dalton saw Bernard Benstock’s essay on Gaddis’s allege
d debt to Joyce, he asked WG’s permission to quote his earlier note in a letter he later sent to the editor of Contemporary Literature, who never printed it.]

  Croton-on-Hudson NY

  19 March 1967

  Dear Mr. Dalton.

  Thanks for your note. You’ve my permission to publish that 1963 note if you like, though rereading it now I wonder, did I read Portrait of the Artist in college? or read in it? and if it matters? since it could I assume scarcely affect such observations as “the correspondences continue to accumulate toward a definitive theory of imitation and conscious borrowing” (from Ulysses). I saw and of course was most intrigued by the results of Mr Benstock’s ingenuity, as I was by a Master’s thesis I once saw in which the candidate drew similarly appallingly precise parallels with Nightwood (though albeit blessed with a far from photographic memory, I’d read that one).

  Maybe Joyce read people like the I assume now quite forgotten Andrew Lang too? and we’ve become victims of the common misapprehension of Darwin’s common ancestor for ape and man emerging as man descended from the ape. Regarding the whole thing I’m ever more convinced that such matters are best dealt with posthumously, and have scarcely swerved from my feelings when I wrote pp 95–6 of The Recognitions. Finally regarding Joyce’s Ulysses I’ve still not read it but can now enter any discussion with the bravura of “. . . but I’ve seen the movie.”

  Yours,

  William Gaddis

  Andrew Lang: Scottish author of Custom and Myth (1884) and Magic and Religion (1901), two of WG’s sourcebooks for R.

  the movie: Joseph Strick’s film version appeared in 1967.

  To Judith Thompson

  Tues. pm [April? 1967]

  My Whole World:

  how you’ve saturated my life, there’s not a corner anywhere inside or out where I don’t find you waiting, and not there, from that yawning half of Altnaveigh’s bed to the hot-dog cart on 9A where I pass hungry & daren’t stop, I know I’d choke, to Storrs’s theatre showing last night Blowup, without you ergo w/out me, I couldn’t pull a Jablow on you, instead accepted dinner from the people who had me last week named Davis in part I think because she felt her last week Tetrazzini (sp?) was dry & lacking & didn’t want me to carry that impression around when she could & did serve a fine Bourgognionne (damned French) & I left at a decent hour, back to Altnaveigh where the old dog came right into the room & went to sleep under the bed. Cold comfort but I thought it was terribly thoughtful of him to know how much I missed you & try in his own way to help.

  The [camping] trip? Oh Lord, the trip. [...] But, we did cook over a fire, cut wood, sleep 3’’ off the floor, toss marshmallows to raccoons at night, light kerosene lanterns, & I guess pretty generally do all the things we’d have done if we had really been penniless, illiterate, & never amounted to anything back in the hills. I love you. Though it began with our arriving in Washington early enough to go to the Lincoln Memorial & walk around, then out to visit a friend of mine named MacDonald who is with the Office of the Chief of Military History & will probably be in charge of the official history of Vietnam, all that strained because of under-current battle between him & his wife, charming British exballet dancer but Lord you cannot know other people’s marriages and Lord! I thought of us & I thought never! never! we can never let that happen. [...]

  Too possibly what follows will sound like I’m doing everything to evade work, but it’s really trying to get things long postponed done, a note from Arabelle Porter asking how things were going so I will face her Friday lunch [...]. And if manageable expect to go into town tomorrow night or so to talk with this fellow Moore about the most denigrating ways a composer can make a living, to get Edward Bast back on the tracks.

  And you, you . . . can’t bear this letter writing business because mine are so marvelous! they’re not, no, and I almost think it would be terrible if we became adept, exchanged sparkling & accomplished correspondence, things mustn’t get to that point! No, our letters have to stay awkward & just blundering around I love you and I miss you to extinction & don’t dare destroy another word you write me, if you knew how since we talked Sun I’ve waited to get back & get your letter, & how I love your letters, especially this with its enclosure, in today’s mail and what a packet: a letter regarding father’s estate; Pfizer’s Annual Report; Special Money-Saving Certificate for 27 Capital Gain Stocks; solicitation to buy a book “like nothing else that has ever appeared in North America, the secrets of African Sex revealed to you for the first time!” and another containing (also For the First Time) “Over 210 photographs of coital positions!” (this one a product of “Renowned Oriental doctors”); and eighteen fragmentary manuscripts totaling 79 pages (“I’d like you to read the few stories that I enclosed and to give me your opinion of them . . .”) from Adrian Grunberg of West 189th st, of whom I had heretofore been unaware (“He was walking on a hot desert road. There was no one around for miles and the sun was burning fiercely. Suddenly, like a merciful sign from heaven, two huge female breasts appeared in the sky . . .”) Well Judith, dearest, darling, do you wonder how I fight through such offerings for a glimpse of your writing? how when I find it I put it aside to keep for last, pour tea, sit, can’t wait, don’t, . . . you come first. [...]

  And your antiquing, how I thought of you, and your mother, and of you, those 80 miles out into Virginia where it seemed everyone who’d found an old bottle in the cellar and could spell the word had out a sign ‘Antiques’ & I’m sure the practiced eye could have found those seamless lipless bottles we learned bring $50 & heaven knows what else. We’ll do that. And we’ll ransack that place up beyond Storrs. And we’ll . . . oh the things, the things we’ll do!

  And, having taken Robt Graves up to Storrs last night, Be bird, be blossom, comet, star, Be paradisal gates ajar, But still, as woman, cleave you must To who alone endures your trust (me).

  with you know what & you know why

  W.

  Altnaveigh’s [...] 9A: an inn in Storrs, Connecticut, and the 9A highway that leads from Crotonon-Hudson down along the west side of Manhattan.

  Blowup: Michelangelo Antonini’s 1966 film Blow-Up, based loosely upon Julio Cortázar’s short story, “Las babas del diablo.”

  Jablow: WG’s lawyer, Richard B. Jablow.

  MacDonald: Charles B. MacDonald (1922–90), wrote several books on World War II but none on the Vietnam War.

  Arabelle Porter: i.e., Arabel J. Porter, editor of New World Writing who published an excerpt from R in 1952.

  this fellow Moore: unidentified.

  Adrian Grunberg: unknown and apparently unpublished.

  Robt Graves [...] endures your trust: the concluding stanza of “Loving True, Flying Blind,” the penultimate poem in Love Respelt (Doubleday, 1966).

  To John and Pauline Napper

  Saltaire, N.Y. 11781

  15 July ”67

  dear John & Pauline—

  After your diligence, & entirely seductive picture of Ireland, I’ve of course taken the course of least resistance, & apologise heartily for being so long letting you know. But—here is this house of my mother’s out here on Fire Island, a beach settlement about 40 miles from New York, no rent to pay, & the children—who will be with me for August—familar with it, so, I decided to rent the house in Croton and pack up my whole trash heap of notes &c. and try to continue this infernal novel out here, writing on it as well as I have anywhere, it all seems to make the best sense for the summer at any rate, though there are the constant temptations to evade it, painting to be done, windows to be mended, anything resembling work with tangible results and attainable ‘perfection’—even to washing out shirts. But I do not go and lie on the beach, a kind of Puritan rejection of leisure that has dogged my life, though I do hope I will be somewhat more agreeable next month when the children appear.

  And very little ‘entertaining’ [...] But I do go into New York occasionally so if there should be anything you need done there do let me know. Otherwise—well, page 165—no, re
write page 164, then . . . in fact perhaps betetter rewrite starting page 161—or 150—or perhaps better start the whole thing over, and—no! fare forward——let me know news, even —the best wish I can leave you with —if there isn’t any—

  love & best wishes (& from Sarah even in her absence)

  Willie Gaddis

  To David Markson

  Saltaire, NY

  20 July ’67

  Dear David.

  Thanks for your letter from London. I am sorry to have been so poor about answering your items in the past, largely probably because I have had little to say. Thus you find me brisk enough when you ask a tangible like Croton. And it is excellent, bachelor or family (I’m not suggesting the former to you), I can live there for weeks and speak to no one but the clerk at the A&P & comments on the weather with the gas station man. Which I like. You mightn’t. But inevitably with children in school you meet parents, more or less. I do have a few friends there, say 4 families, which is all I want. It is country and because of the twisty up&down nature of the land unsuburbanizable like Long Island. It is attractive, the river is a splendour & quite beyond anything I’ve seen elsewhere. And besides being country it is less than an hour’s drive to NY, trains are not bad (albeit the cars mostly turn-of-the-century items) and offered me the good position of strictly country life when I’m there, or —God forbid it should happen again—as good commuting to NY as one can find elsewhere. With children, as I say, I don’t think one could do better; and even without it’s worked well for me. I don’t know, I get awfully bored in NY, going out, sitting around, hearing myself talk, awfully impatient with it.