B007RT1UH4 EBOK

by Gaddis, William

  Though what my plans are I don’t know. I’ve got my house in Croton rented now in fact for the summer which I’m spending quietly (isn’t the word) at Fire Island, partly to save money, partly to try to work, partly that I’ll have the children for the month of August and it’s a good place for them, I can spend enough time with them but they can lead pretty much their own social lives. My mother is here so, as I say, quiet (this being one of the quieter communities), Judith gets out usually weekends, and I paint (not pictures, old iron beds &c) & patch and go back to this damned typewriter. God knows. I don’t generally answer people anymore even friends who ask how/when &c the book is coming, but simply to say I’m working, that is, it’s still in my hands. How tired one gets of one’s own voice. Unless it’s saying something sensible like I love you. But even at that, providing one isn’t saying it because he can think of no other news, or would rather not say You have bad breath, one doesn’t hear it one’s self.

  Do you see Katy Carver? Ask her to send me a line. How can Dean Rusk go on being Dean Rusk? How can people get into cars and go to Expo ”67? And PS to the above, Croton is not the south, Faulkner’s or anyone’s else. I was in Lawton Okla 4 times and never ceased to wonder why people there got up in the morning.

  best wishes to you & Elaine

  W. Gaddis

  Dean Rusk: Secretary of State from 1961–69.

  Expo ”67: a world’s fair held in Montreal in 1967, the most popular of its kind.

  Elaine: Markson’s wife, a prominent literary agent.

  To Alice Denham

  [Denham had asked WG for a blurb for her first novel, My Darling from the Lions (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), and received this tardy reply, which appears on p. 283 of her Sleeping with Bad Boys.]

  25 Park Trail

  Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

  [postmarked 12 January 1968]

  Dear Alice—I’m sorry for the lateness of this for I’ve had your book & started it—But do recall our talk about quotes, at that party I think, and why it’s never made sense for me to give one because I honestly can’t believe my name would sell a single copy so that—since it is not a name in the public mind like Mailer’s for instance—my name on the jacket of someone else’s work, or in an ad, flatly would strike me as an advertisement for myself, like the raft of provincial reviewers whose livelihood apparently depends on such publicity—that’s from my point of view, & from yours—I’m convinced it wouldn’t change your sales etc at all—where publishers get these ideas I cannot imagine—I even recently got in the mail a big book of Aubrey Beardsley drawings—some quite startling—with request for comment—imagine my name selling Aubrey Beardsley! I don’t think anyone’s figured out the chemistry of book sales—except the fact that the one who sells books is the man in the bookstore—and as I know, there’s altogether too much pain connected with it—hang on—all I know that counts is luck & I certainly wish you that—I’ll keep an eye for reviews—

  Willie Gaddis

  Aubrey Beardsley: English artist (1872–1898) associated with the decadent 1890s.

  To John and Pauline Napper

  [From 1968 to 1970 WG frequently interrupted work on J R for freelance writing projects, mostly for Eastman Kodak, but also for Audio Adventures (a tour of Greenwich Village) and Film Enterprises (on IBM software; WG’s first draft was deemed by a Film Enterprises exec “a little too profound and needed reshaping in a manner that would be informative at a shallower depth”). One of the projects resulted in a book: A Pile Fabric Primer (Crompton-Richmond Company, 1970).]

  Saltaire, N.Y. 11706

  4 July ”68

  Dear John & Pauline —

  I think that today, or yesterday, or tomorrow, is the day I’ve been waiting for for about 4 months, simply in terms of sitting down.

  First, —Judith and I got married. That was about 4 weeks ago, & that is the best affirmation of recent years. All around it various aspects of confusion: my Mother returned from California not in very good condition, got progressively worse & finally, when I came back from a ‘business trip’ to Rochester, I got her hospitalised, she came out of there better, is now in a convalescent home & I expect to bring her out here in a week or so, when she’ll be better able to get around. How all that is going to work out there’s no way to know yet. Then, the children’s mother moving them to Boston finally came off, again emotional & confusing scene, but finally done & better than the uncertainty & the waiting. In between all the above my fly-by-night trips to E Kodak in Rochester, getting a job, hurrying back to Croton, writing the whatever-they-wanted, mailing it &c &c; took Matthew off on a camping trip last week which was fine enough even though it was rain constantly, & now at last we’ve got all of our stuff out here, including my barrels & barrels of papers, clippings &c that hope some day to be a novel. Sarah has gone south (Carolina) to visit a cousin till mid-July, & Judith & I & Matthew are settled in at the house on Fire Island, she with a new sewing machine making pillows a mile a minute with spreads & curtains in between.

  And this I pray is the way it will continue through August. As I say I expect to bring my Mother out next week, & she will stay the summer through. The children are to return to their mother the 18 August. And in between I will (I hope) be back on and off the Rochester run, 3 or 4 jobs for them will get us through the summer. And possibly, if I have the sense to grasp it, time to get back on this novel. [...] curious how some of us who are obsessed with order seem constantly immersed in disorder.

  We all send love & let us know how you prosper—

  Willie

  Matthew: Gaddis’s son, then ten.

  To Sarah Gaddis

  [An undated memo attached to a copy of an undated obituary-essay on Samuel E. Williams (died 1937; see headnote to 16 November 1943) entitled “The Road That Leads to Somewhere” by Philip Kabel, possibly from the Union City Times Gazette. The article discusses the maternal side of WG’s family history in some detail.]

  Dear Sarah——you have asked often enough about the family story and I thought you might find this of interest. It is from an Indiana newspaper about 30 years ago—Robert Way was Grandmother’s ‘brother’—S.E. Williams was your great great Grandfather—and you see there is an Indian princess way back in your family—and that you had ancestors settling in Boston about 340 years ago! (I also thought you’d like some of the names, like Peninah!—)

  much love from

  Papa

  Robert Way: the obituary also notes the recent death at age 31 of Robert Dickinson Way, a pianist and music professor.

  an Indian princess: Mary Crews, described by Kabel as “a Cherokee Indian princess” (cf. note to 13 August 1956).

  ancestors settling in Boston: Kabel notes that Williams’s ancestors “settled in Boston in 1630.”

  Peninah: “In 1876,” Kabel writes, Williams “was married to Ella Hough, daughter of Moses and Peninah Hough.”

  To Sarah Gaddis

  [An undated letter (probably January 1969) reproduced here as an example of WG’s calligraphic handwriting.]

  Candide or Ethan Frome: WG quoted Voltaire’s novella earlier (4 May 1951). Edith Wharton’s short novel (1911) is mentioned in passing in J R (516).

  To Sarah Gaddis

  [A birthday greeting to his daughter, who was living near Boston with her brother and her mother’s third husband and children. In February 1969 WG had bought a house about 10 miles north of New York City, which would become the setting for Carpenter’s Gothic. WG’s mother had recently died.]

  25 Ritie street

  Piermont NY 1968

  8 Sept. 69

  Dear Sarah.

  Here you are, with Birthday distributed in pieces around coming and going and school. Perhaps this is normal for Virgo? Mr Thompson’s birthday in late August (Virgo) went on-and-off-and-on for 4 days. At any rate you will find enclosed the confirmation that you are 14 (count them), and I so earnestly hope the day itself is a good one. Unmitigated (look it up!) praise of course is something we shou
ld all be wary of so I won’t do that here, since obviously there are a few areas for improvement which is part of the process of growing up, but you are a daughter to be immensely proud of, and I am, as I said in another letter to you, less frequently aware than I should be of the privilege. It was an awareness Grandmother had, and even though her later days were not easy ones I hope you know how much pride and very real joy she took in you and Matthew, how much the very fact of your happy existence added to her life. Her loss is something I am far from used to and I know you have similar feelings but, after all, we might scarcely miss her so much if she had not been so close and generous to us all our lives and so our missing her is really a measure of all she did for us, in which I think she found her own reward.

  And so how many ways your starting off into high school is a new start and a demanding one and an exciting one, and one in which I hope you won’t look for instant results or solutions, or make instant judgments (of people ‘good’ and otherwise), of yourself and where you stand and who you are in relation to those around you.

  I know you are impatient about life, which is very much a part of being 14, and so make an effort to take your time about looking over things and people and situations and yourself in relation to them, so that you can keep a little freedom of choice when choices present themselves. At the heart of all this I think is your regard for yourself and your worth as a person, and the essential idea that you must put a high value on yourself. I don’t mean ‘snob’ value or more-clothes-than-so-&-so or cash-in-hand or ‘popularity’, because these are all just the cheapenings of your worth, your real worth as a person, and perhaps you can get some idea of that in the love that so many of us have for you, and some of the confidence to play things a little cool and above all to keep your sense of humour! Because a sense of humour is simply a sense of proportion, of the real worth of things in relation to each other, which lets you see how totally ridiculous some of the most intensely fought out selfish battles can often be, and Sarah if you can keep your sense of humour you are a step ahead almost anywhere you go.

  Of course we all regret the fact of your birthday falling in the midst of change and readjustment on so many hands, so that it cannot be the kind of Cake-and-Hands-around-the-table occasion dear to even grown-up children. So on Wednesday I hope you won’t feel any “gyp” that some of it is already behind you (that you’re wearing some of it, that is) but have a fine birthday there. And then I have written your Mother about our going out to a somewhat belated birthday dinner on Monday when we bring Matthew back up. How would that be? And then we can go over various things including your allowance which I know got somewhat confused on your last visit and is in arrears, clothing money, &c.

  Like those people in Our Town it seems so difficult sometimes simply to stop and live ‘every every minute’. I will be so eager to hear about people and school, perhaps you can take us over Monday for a look around? since by then of course you will know it intimately. [...]

  with much much love,

  Papa

  Mr Thompson: Judith’s father.

  Our Town: Thornton Wilder’s popular play (1938), which asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

  To David Markson

  [Markson asked WG for a blurb for his novel Going Down (1970).]

  Piermont, N.Y.

  5 March 1970

  Dear David.

  Your letter touches on a difficult area, one I have never entirely resolved in anything but practice which is why it has taken me so long to respond.

  At the outset though to try to keep up minute-by-minute with the reception of a book that has cost one as much as this one has cost you, let alone to try to take part in it, is plain Chinese water torture, drop by drop, when you are in the most vulnerable position conceivable, quoting the Library Journal of all things, ‘suspenseful plot, superb dialogue’, you know it ends up like the psychiatrist being greeted with “Good morning . . .” muttering “What do you think he meant by that?” And hell you know all this, you have neither the body of Jaqueline Suzanne nor the prim crust of a non-adventurer like Capote, and ‘If I were you . . .’ as advice never tires of phrasing it I would lay hands on every available penny take wife and children and pack up, let the book go out and do what it’s going to do anyhow.

  My feeling essentially is that a book really goes out on its own, for the human remains that wrote it to run along after it is suicidal since there’s clearly no separating them until the mortal partner drops. I don’t think ‘one decent blurb or two’ is going to alter Asher’s promotion at all, I don’t think lack of them is going to deter it; and the whole God damned area is to me like trying to make magic that will shape a course already implicit and then, if the course takes the feared-for direction, blaming the ex post facto magic, or the lack of it. I’ve never had my name on anybody else’s book jack or ad that I know of, I honestly do not think it would help sell a copy, it reeks a bit of self-advertisement though perhaps, out of a deep mistrust for human motives or rather of them and the abyss between them and their expression this is merely an extreme inverted vanity on my part. Because on the other hand I do admire the generosity of people of stature like, say, Robert Graves, Norman Mailer, TS Eliot writing jacket blurbs for Faber, all of these people quite open-handed. I don’t know. I think of a boy I had at Univ of Connecticut working on a novel which I greatly encouraged, think publishable & have tried to help him place, he’s someone who’s never published and I hope to see have a chance, when/if his book is published, what. I don’t know.

  I do marvel at the way in your book you have managed to sustain the tension of atmosphere to a point of shutting out a reader’s day-to-day reality that is eventually any writer’s (real writers) objective. By the same token I don’t believe that phrased for a blurb would sell or not sell. Ask Aaron Asher about my reaction to the string of blurbs on the back of Meridian’s The Recognitions; but he was publishing it, a fact for which I am of course eternally grateful, as I was to you for helping to stimulate his interest in it, & as its publisher how he handled things was his business, I told him my feelings & stepped out, & he did a fine job of it.

  Are reviewers influenced/cowed by blurbs? and does it matter one simple God damn anyhow? Recall the now quite forgotten ‘critical acclaim’ of the most widely unread best seller of the time, By Love Possessed—and reread Dwight MacDonald’s destruction of that review chorus. I as much as any & perhaps more than many am vividly aware of the exaggerated pain of every reviewer’s stab or even patronizing applause; but Jesus Christ looking at it all what’s become of the Hicks Geismars Sterling Norths, nothing left but a whine in the air somewhere. I remain or rather, The Recognitions does. So does Lowry’s Volcano, so does yours unless you confuse yourself with them is my feeling, if you play their game not your own.

  best regards

  W. Gaddis

  Jaqueline Suzanne: Jacqueline Susann (1918–74), author of Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine, and other best-sellers of the time.

  Univ of Connecticut: Gaddis taught there for a semester in 1967.

  By Love Possessed: Macdonald’s essay on James Gould Cozzens’s 1957 novel, “By Cozzens Possessed,” appeared in the July 1958 issue of Commentary and was reprinted in his book Against the American Grain (1962).

  Sterling Norths: Sterling North’s insulting review of R appeared in the New York World Telegram & Sun, 10 March 1955, 22.

  To William Jovanovich

  [WG wrote to Harcourt, Brace’s president several times in the late 1960s asking for a reversion of rights to his first novel, even offering to buy the rights, without success. The Harvest trade paperback edition of 1970, published without WG’s knowledge, was offset from the first edition, thereby ignoring all the corrections WG had made for the 1962 Meridian edition, and tying up the rights for the foreseeable future.]

  Piermont, NY

  15 April 1970

  Dear Sir.

  You might imagine
my dismay on reading in a recent Times of your retirement as president of Harcourt, Brace, that I had not waited for your succession by someone less egregiously attached to my novel The Recognitions to express my interest in the rights, someone who might, after its 15 years of confinement there, have happily given up a bad job of such historic proportions and allowed us all the possibility of seeing it republished in an attractive cheap edition, both at a profit and a decently fair price to the student audience your back-list feeds upon, and in the corrected version once briefly available.

  I have just seen your ‘Harvest’ reissue of the book which would seem finally to preclude realization of these considerations elsewhere, and clearly pretends to none of them itself, especially deplorable in the case of the last mentioned for which there is no responsible excuse whatsoever and apparently no redress but this note which sincerely looks for no response from you, not even still another fatuous recital of your magnanimity in authorizing a $500. general advance those 15 years ago and long since earned back, made even more abject by your most recent gratuitous and quite shabby reference to Bernice Baumgarten in its connection.

  William Gaddis

  Bernice Baumgarten: the agent who sold R to Harcourt, Brace.

  To William L. Bradley

  [A scholar and philanthropist (1918–2007), and Assistant Director for Arts and Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1966 to 1971. Coincidentally, Gerald Freund (1930–97), mentioned in the first sentence below, was the director of the MacArthur Foundation’s Prize Fellows Program when WG was awarded one of its “genius” awards in 1982.]