B007RT1UH4 EBOK

by Gaddis, William

  Love to you and Peter — — — Papa

  To Judith Gaddis

  Nishitetsu Grand Hotel

  Fukuoka, Japan

  11 Sept. 1976

  Dearest—

  the hotel looks grand enough but the room is quite wee—but starkly nice, “I’ve grown accustomed to her (your) face” on the piped-in music radio, bottle of black beer and drying out in my kimono after taking Professor Miyamoto to dinner in pouring rain, part of a real typhoon passing through (they say)—I’m sure ruined both our shoes but seemed the least I could do since everyone has been so kind.

  I flew down here this morning from Sapporo where I’d arrived yesterday morning and given my “talk” late in the day to about 35 people largely college professors, 4 of whom took me to dinner afterward so eager for me to be pleased (and very struck, I was told, at how natural and humble I was for someone who had won such an important prize!)—2 of them there this morning (men of about 60) to see me off all of course immensely touching & flattering, much bowing and smiling on all sides—

  So now I have 4 more of these (‘talks’)—here in Fukuoka tomorrow, then Osaka, then Kyoto, then Nagoya—and then some sort of interview in Tokyo the evening before I come back and as intriguing and flattering as it all is I honestly cannot wait. [...]

  In terms of making the ‘good’ impression I feel I’m managing, John Gardner apparently left everyone along this route with a really bad taste in their mouths, real pain in the neck I’d pictured (for my own obvious reasons)—[...]

  Saturday morning—I realize you will get this barely a day before I get back—which seems silly but here it is seems like 6 months and I cannot wait!

  with all kinds of love,

  W.

  “I’ve grown accustomed to her face”: a song from the 1956 stage version of My Fair Lady, written by Frederick Loewe (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics).

  Professor Miyamoto: Yokichi Miyamoto, who published an account of WG’s visit in Eigo Seinen, 1 December 1976, 404–6; available online at http://www.williamgaddis.org/nonfiction/interviewmiyamoto.shtml.

  John Gardner: American novelist (1933–82) whose insulting review of J R in the New York Review of Books (“Big Deals,” 10 June 1976, 35–40) is a recurring topic in later letters.

  To Sarah Gaddis

  [In his first semester at Bard (and subsequently), WG taught both creative writing and a course on the theme of failure in American literature and culture, the basis for his essay “The Rush for Second Place” (1981).]

  Piermont

  8 October 76

  Dear Sarah,

  I was very happy to have your letter—and word that the stereo arrived & got set up & ‘sounds great’—and was baptised with Chopin. No better choice.

  Bard is fine although I still labour under silent stares, at me or at the floor. Nine people showed up for the writing ‘workshop’ & 27 for ‘Failure’, which should tell me something! As usual getting ‘writing’ to discuss is like pulling teeth. But why are they there then? On the other hand the Failure people I think are really doing the reading (I pared the number down to 21) & quite responsive in discussion, I hope it keeps up. At the end of each class I feel I’ve exhausted my material for the whole term. Also I now have 3 advisees (word?) working on senior writing projects, one of which is a short novel in which the author insists absolutely nothing happens. I’ve read 24pp. & so far nothing has. [...]

  love from us all,

  Papa

  To Candida Donadio

  Piermont NY

  12 Dec. ’76

  Dear Candida.

  I think we agree we have about all the information, disheartening as it may be, that we are going to get; and there is little choice now but to move on it. After talking with you, and then going over the entire thing in detail with Judith, I’ve tried to clear my head of past hopes & irritants & make a completely fresh start. This is the approach I suggest:

  1. Drop Silverman flat (unless forced to return to him as a last resort if step 4 below fails): he has at least served the function of providing us with a $25 thousand base figure.

  2. Reconsider Knopf. This is a painful turn-around for me of course, since they are hardly my favourite house & I have little or no faith in Gottlieb’s performance. However in this case we are not after performance, but simply as much money in front as we can get.

  Gottlieb has told you he is interested in my next book to the point of 50 or 60 thousand. He may have assumed another book of the weight & significance of J R & its predecessor when he named those figures, & what we do not know is whether he would consider the comparatively short & simpler western in those terms. He knows about the screenplay & presumably is aware that it remains unsold. Thus he might scale his offer on it down to the Silverman level or below if he is interested at all. On the other hand, I believe he thinks in terms of a fast buck & might be interested in that possibility which the western offers.

  Therefore I suggest we approach him now on the western in terms of the above figures. If he is interested but backs off from those figures, go as low as 40 thousand if he will offer that (2-year delivery & otherwise same contract as on J R but without option clause).

  This has two advantages. First, if he made the above offer he might also be willing to leave the $5 thousand in abeyance, which we would otherwise most likely have to repay him from any money from elsewhere. Second, if Gottlieb turns it or those terms down, we should be free to very openly go elsewhere.

  3. This would mean you should be able to approach substantial firms like Random House, S&S, &c, rather than furtive moves among small independents.

  4. If none of the above prospers & the best offer remains in the $25 thousand range, see if Aaron [Asher] is interested to that extent.

  What do you think.

  [unsigned]

  Silverman: perhaps Jim Silberman, editor-in-chief of Random House.

  To Ólafur Gunnarsson

  [An Icelandic poet and novelist (1948– ), several of whose books have been translated into English.]

  Piermont, NY 10968

  18 March 1977

  Dear Mr Gunnarsson,

  Simply a note to thank you sincerely & very much for your letters & high opinion of my work, as well as for the poetry which I should have acknowledged long before this. Whatever may be happening to J R here in the US, which I think is not very much, it is really pleasing to know that I have a gratifying reader in Zaire, one in Manila, & now Reykjavik. Heaven knows when I may be passing by, over or through Iceland but I would certainly look you up —meanwhile go on & finish your ‘long long novel’ before you go out a window: you can imagine how many times I was ready to do just that in the course of those 2 books & so write you this from a ground-floor room.

  with best regards,

  William Gaddis

  To Judith Gaddis

  [This portion of a longer letter to Judith in Key West concerns a writers’ conference at New College in Sarasota, Florida, that Rust Hills was organizing for June, which included William H. Gass and Vance Bourjaily (1922–2010), among others. See 28 June 1977 below.]

  Piermont

  Fri p.m., 18 March [1977]

  Dear Judith,

  [...] And from the constantly changing Sarasota front: John Barth can’t make it so Rust Hills gets Susan Sontag, then she’s sick and Barthelme drops out so he gets Hortense Calisher & Vance Bourjaily (sp?); meanwhile I am shying from readings and panels and finally have a good & encouraging talk with William Gass coming with his wife, Hills meanwhile reshaping it into a no-lecture no-panel informal thing at least that’s how it stands now, but if Gass abruptly disappears I may be tempted to do the same. (Which of course is nonsense because for me it’s little or nothing to [do] with anything but the fee is it: Barthelme drops out because he’s already overbooked with just this sort of thing; Calisher is a star, Vance has got nothing else to do, Gass admires me because I’ve been able to stay out (till now), I admire him because he separates it all clearly
& relaxedly in his head (‘my public & private selves haven’t even shaked hands for many years’); & from admire to envy, (Candida says) Puzo envies my status of which he feels he has none, I his money of which we know God damned well we’ve got none; & so much for the nickel-&-diming Hills & Plimptons where success isn’t except for Rust & George for that moment. I used to think it mattered.) [...]

  with love always,

  W.

  Puzo: Mario Puzo (1920–99), best-selling author of The Godfather (1969).

  To John Large

  [A student of WG’s at Bard College. The following accompanied a story by Large.]

  [postmarked Suffern, New York

  13 May 1977]

  John Large.

  Fact these pages aren’t littered with red underlinings, question marks, stabs of punctuation, doesn’t mean I didn’t read them, & more than once. As I’m sure I’ve remarked before, it’s been refreshing to come upon someone for whom the language is a real live means of communication rather than an unfamiliar barrier in itself. Perhaps in fact it’s too easy? why you press it as far as you do? My own sense of all this I think comes down to this terrible search for something worth writing about, worth one’s talents (I’m not being facetious), almost the sense here sometimes of your frustration with the inadequacy of your material, & so making the writing itself the substance. Have you read anything of Joan Didion’s? do you need to? A marvelous sense of fragmented style & refusal to tell too much.

  Go to Appalachia (sp?) & work in a mine? get a job in a brassiere factory? a morgue? on a tuna boat? I don’t know, seems what’s needed is a unifying kind of closed-end scene, or (&) a unifying closed-end obsession & watch it spread (I took, first, forgery; then ‘business’) but something, perhaps—& in contradiction of the dictum ‘write what you know about’—not too close in one’s own life. Dan Haas in our group for instance I think set himself a nice problem with his Boy Prophet, he certainly has the facility & has given himself something to solve. (I think of writing perhaps too much so as problem solving.) Point is not to get one’s self in a corner; & to try to settle for the fact—unlikely as it must seem—that there’s plenty of time.

  good luck with it

  W. Gaddis

  Joan Didion: American journalist and novelist (1934– ); WG often assigned his students her Play It as It Lays (1970) in his creative writing classes.

  our group: Large remembered the group as including Dan Haas, Shari Nussbaum, Joshua Greyson, and Mary Caponegro. Only the last went on to achieve any critical acclaim as a writer.

  To Rust Hills and Joy Williams

  [For Hills, see 15 February 1961. His wife Joy Williams (1944– ) is the author of State of Grace (1973), a novel WG greatly admired, and other books of fiction. The following is a “memo” typed on stationery from “The JR Family Of Companies.”]

  28 June 1977

  TO: Rust Hills

  Joy Williams

  Management wishes to express its profound thanks for your many successful efforts to feed, comfort, entertain, blandish, and otherwise distract our recent representative at your conference.

  This is doubly appreciated in light of the fact that we do not let him out often in his present somewht unstable condition for fear he may embarrass both the corporate image and his hosts, to say nothing of himself or anyone within reach. From press accounts recently received at our office here we are grateful that this occurred only to a limited degree and the kind but firm restraint you appear to have exercised to that end is appreciated accordingly.

  Finally, we are of course exceedingly pleased at the circulation given our Product insofar as this may influence sales which, as you are aware, is our only reason for remaining in business.

  For the Management, cordially

  Willie

  and kindest personal regards from Mister Gaddis.

  To Joy William and Rust Hills

  Piermont

  7 July 1977

  Dear Joy & Rust,

  Thanks for your good letters. Of course I would love to come up to Stonington. At the moment I am girding my loins to face a Univ. of Rochester version of the Sarasota meeting, up this Sunday the 10th & back the following Saturday, I did it last year & it’s considerably more frenetic than the Florida version, under direction of a madman named LJ Davis; but it won’t have Gass, won’t have yourselves, won’t have a Karen. I think it is rotten you didn’t bring her back up with you. Why didn’t I rent your cottage down there?

  Yes I was sent the press assaults from Tampa, never been treated so artily as that cover item but why am I always the Best Unknown Writer in America? As for that woman in St P Times . . . !

  Honeyed rum voice indeed!

  I’ve just got back from an R&R weekend out at Sag Harbor, many friends out there (not including the Easthampton contingent) & wish I’d bought a house there 12 years ago when I visited in a similar abandoned state, still a temptation if I can figure out what to do with this white elephant on Fire Isld, haven’t even been able to rent it for August & don’t especially want to spend August there myself just to get my taxes’ worth, this going back & forth between empty houses is conducive to nothing but drink & still no word at all on the future being planned or more likely unplanned for me & God knows what August will bring.

  At any rate I’ll be in touch with you when I get back from Rochester & as I say greatly look forward to the visit you suggest, & really again thank you both so much for all in connection with the Sarasota episode, I’m glad it worked out as well for everyone else as it did for me, really helped.

  best regards

  Willie

  LJ Davis: American novelist (1940–2011), then director of the writing seminar at the University of Rochester.

  To Sarah Gaddis

  Piermont

  8 August 1977

  Dear Sarah,

  I immensely appreciated your long letter—and the ‘day off’ time you took to write it—even though it’s taking me this long to respond. And for your solicitous concern for me & Judith & all your generous suggestions of help. She stopped over here last week & I read what you’d said & it all did reach her, as it did me, but I think also simply through its generosity helped drive home to each of us a rather opposite point, which is at this point not only you can’t help us, & she & I can’t really help each other—patching things up after a domestic ‘spat’—until she & I separately get clearer grasps of who we want to be & what we want to do with what time we’ve got left in this world besides eat drink grow older & lean on each other.

  So while I can hardly say that I’m that pleased by what she’s done, in a sense she had good reason to call a halt to things as they were going day to day & much of it the cumulative result of the position I took a long time ago when I got out of the 9–5 job circuit. In this, it’s got to do with what sociologist David Reisman labeled as ‘inner-directed’ vs. ‘outer-directed’ people, & very much what J R is all about: JR is the outer-directed, takes unquestioningly as his own goals all those material ones he sees others around him striving for as ‘what you’re supposed to do’. Whereas Bast, as the incipient artist, is trying to develop the inner-directed capacity of the artist against all the odds it holds: doubts & lack of confidence in one’s talents (that what one is doing is really ‘worth doing’), worldly pressures of money, ‘success’ &c. And Gibbs, the book’s ‘failure’, is the man destroyed by the conflict between these forces.

  Well, there’s my morning lecture. I only got off into it because a lot of the present problem here I think has got to do with the peril in that inner-directed course when it suddenly seems to lack direction, & (certainly from the experience of other writers) not that unusual when one has finally finished a long inner-directed project. Probably obviously, the only thing approaching a solution to this dilemma is some intelligent mixture of the 2 approaches, which is why there was a certain satisfaction in doing the Kodak speeches but there seems to be very little such work around these days. At any rate with Judith o
r without that’s the one I’ve got to solve again—because (unless one is Mozartian genius) it’s never solved once for all. (As Auden said: True wars are never won.) [...]

  meanwhile thanks you know, and much love always

  Papa

  David Reisman: (1909–2002); Riesman’s classic study The Lonely Crowd (1950), which discusses these concepts, was on WG’s “Failure” reading list some semesters at Bard. The syllabus for one semester of this course was published in Review of Contemporary Fiction 31.1 (Spring 2011): 116–17.

  Auden [...] never won: actually, the concluding line of poem 30 in e. e. cummings’s 1 x 1 (1944). A decade later WG contemplated using this line as the title of his fourth novel.

  To Cynthia Buchanan

  [American novelist and screenplay writer (1942– ). Her quirky novel Maiden appeared in 1972 (William Morrow); her right arm was cropped from the author’s photo on the back cover, hence WG’s final sentence.]

  Piermont, NY 10968

  17 August 1977

  dear Cyndy,

  thanks for sending the copy of Maiden, Sherry had already recommended it & it was on my reading list. By all means give my name to the Guggenheim people, I don’t know the politics there & only wish I could feel that my word would do that much good since your credentials certainly appear to be all they could ask—though I find it hard to believe you don’t know lots of writers of ‘serious fiction’.

  I want to get back out there before summer collapses & would hope to see you again (having of course by then read Maiden), if only to confirm your right arm which I can’t find in that stunning dust jacket photograph, very disturbing.

  best regards

  W. Gaddis