B007RT1UH4 EBOK
Page 46
Sherry: John Sherry (1923–99), novelist, poet, and playwright, and a friend since the 1950s. WG refers to him as “The Sage of Sag Harbor” in FHO (75). After WG died, Sherry wrote “In Recognition: Remembering William Gaddis,” Hamptons Country, June 1999, 76–80.
To John and Pauline Napper
Piermont NY 10968
24 August 1977
Dear John & Pauline,
Thanks for your note & I too should have written sooner but have been having a rather low time since I saw you last: could you believe that that evening we came to your show & went on to take Judith to the airport, that I did not see her again till about 3 weeks ago. She was in Key West, trying to sort out what she wants (this ‘freedom’ women that age are into these days), I had no idea of a separation till it prolonged itself to almost 5 months of straight hell at this end. She’s been back staying with her mother across the river, we’ve had a few agonized conversations & she’s going back to K.W. tomorrow to, again, try to figure out what she wants, I’d hoped we could pull it together but now have a good deal less of hope than a few weeks ago but know I cannot go on living this dangling drinking life too much longer. [...]
WG’s home, the carpenter gothic house he shared with his wife Judith in Piermont, New York.
Sorry to load the above on you & wish to heaven I had brighter news, my God will the day ever come! I will be teaching 2 days a week at Bard College again this fall trying to get a little out of debt & my damned teeth fixed —things you know all about at first hand but be glad you don’t know everything about life at first hand that I do. [...]
Willie
To David Madden
[American novelist and critic (1933– ), for decades a professor at Louisiana State University. Madden wrote one of the earliest appreciations of R (in Rediscoveries, 1971), and in September 1977 sent WG a draft of an essay later published in a reference book entitled American Novelists since World War II (Gale Research, 1978, 2:162–70). Earlier Madden had sent WG a copy of his critically acclaimed novel Bijou (1974).]
Piermont
16 September 1977
Dear David Madden.
I did get your novel Bijou & am sorry to have waited for the provocation of this last mailing to write & thank you for sending it. I’ve put off everything till after Labor Day & now everything is here including pulling myself together to teach at Bard again this fall, so between reading for that I’ve taken quick looks into your book & of course am caught by its nowhere-but-America theme (if that is I’ve grasped it in such glimpses) & look forward to reading it through.
I had no idea the piece for this Gale publication would be so extensive. Beyond any writer’s natural thin-skinnedness, I don’t see anything I’d call distortions (having, indeed, survived John Gardner’s sloppily confused & error-ridden tendentious review in the NY Review of Books), & while the following looks long and carping I stress only that all the below are simply for your consideration (though a few are fact changes) to include or not as you see fit, despite the peremptory style:
[Some two dozen comments keyed to Madden’s page numbers follow, most minor (“for ‘1952’ read ‘1951’”), but a few worth quoting, beginning with a query regarding Madden’s interpretation of Wyatt’s activities at the end of R.]
• (note: is he ‘restoring’ or simply scraping paintings down to the canvas, tabula rasa, for a fresh start)
• for ‘His mother sleeps all the time’ read ‘His mother, who is a nurse, comes and goes and sleeps at odd times’ or some such. (note: this is an important point, that in any real terms J R has no family, in effect (& in contrast to Bast) no past: he is all present, the moment. As you note later (p. 23), The surface is all.)
• (note: this is one of those difficult instances of the writer’s intentions vs. the reader’s impression, the sort that provokes some writers to send indignant letters (‘May I be permitted to point out to your reviewer that on page 000 &c) to book reviews, as I have always resisted doing. The reader, even George Steiner in the New Yorker review, is welcome to his impression however distorted it pleases him to make it; & as I think even Wyatt may have said somewhere there’s no way to follow one’s work around saying ‘but this is what I meant . . .’ Either the work says it or it doesn’t.
So in this case, as an obviously careful & sympathetic reader your impression may well reflect my failure to make a point clearly, or rather my tendency to make it obliquely; but in Bast’s defense, after his garbled realization (p. 687) that he doesn’t ‘have to’ write music (as a burden carried from the past), his ambitions have diminished through the book from his initial opera through cantata, suite, to at last the piece for unaccompanied cello (p. 675) which he desperately rescues from the wastebasket as he leaves the hospital (p. 718) as signifying his realization that if he is going to fail it will be with his own work not that of others, if there is damage it will be his own.
Thus Bast’s outcry at the end (p. 725) to Eigen, seeking this same unfinished score in the trash heap of unfinished & never-to-be-finished work of Eigen’s/Gibbs’/Schramm’s generation, consigns all their unrealised ambitions to trash for the very fact of being unrealized, the direction his own ambitions have been headed & from which he is now desperately intent on rescuing them (not, in fact, unlike Wyatt’s fresh start at the end of The Recognitions, having been through the crucible.)
• (note: as a matter of possible interest you may have remarked & dismissed: this ‘who uses whom’ thesis is pervasive in J R & obsessional in The Recogntions where Wyatt, as the flawed creative force (as reduced as Bast) is the missing part others seek to use, from Valentine to Sinisterra at the end.)
I must say I’m impressed by the Bibliography you’ve assembled, may be missing some minor items but has some I didn’t know of. [. . .] I hope all the foregoing doesn’t sound too carping, I don’t mean to contest your interpretation & as I say you are certainly free to make what use what you want of it; which is to say that I do greatly appreciate the work & care you’ve put into it, if only it will enable me to refer people who write me for such information to it without having to rehearse the whole thing each time myself. Is there some definite date for publication?
Thanks again for letting me see it,
all best regards,
William Gaddis
‘who uses whom’: a question posed by Vladimir Lenin and quoted both in J R (486) and in WG’s Saul Bellow review (RSP 74).
To John Napper
Piermont
13 October 1977
Dear John.
I know how much time & thought & feeling went into your letter & to say I appreciate it is thin stuff —in fact if there is one real revelation & awfully good thing that’s got to me in this entire mess it’s been the marvelous importance of friends, in which I’m terribly fortunate —I don’t mean simply as people to deluge with one’s troubles, but some closer look at what friendship’s all about & which may, in the last analysis (which one thinks about these autumn days), be the only thing in this turbulent world worth the having. In fact Judith’s been away for so damned long by this time (since the end of February) that she’s rapidly becoming rather an idea than a person. Still a terribly quiet house & somehow a chilly one, wash out one’s shirts, cook for 1, nobody to share the small great things of life with like the turning of the leaves, nobody but the fool cat stamping about & shouting for his supper while the porch steps collapse & I add that project to my list of things undone, invitations to stylish openings unattended in favour of sitting here with a glass of whisky & wishing I could write a maudlin popular song (viz. one current: ‘The windows of the world are covered with rain . . .’), you see what I mean. But frankly there is also a modicum of comfort in the sense of one less person to disappoint, a personal extension of the collapse of the Protestant Ethic which I suppose is my eventual obsession.
And so nothing at all in your letter looking sympathetically at these girls’ & women’s plight annoys me or upsets me, I understand it & k
now it’s all true, that one ‘can’t stand still & protected behind someone else’, that ‘love must be free from dependence’ &c &c, & that in essence it’s as difficult if not more so for them (Judith) as for us (me) to be participants in this historic watershed between the madness of the Judeo-Christian oppression & what’s ever ahead, where surely the Buddhist approach you note must have a place if we are to survive at all.
And yet. And yet. All the interlaced guilt in the P.E. notwithstanding these concepts of personal responsibility that come down with it, mangled as they have become, are a central fact I cannot escape (unless of course, op. cit., some one else’s action gives me ‘one less person to disappoint’). There’s Matthew for instance, he’s come up with some bad numbers but got through them & right now is working a 9 hour day in a Boston restaurant & taking 2 evening classes at Harvard, & even though I think it will prove too much for him to handle a great deal of what he’s trying to do emerges from almost 20 years of me as his father & I can’t see, or even seek, any alternative to another 3 or 4 years of tuitions though I cannot presently imagine how I can meet them. Sarah got into & did well at the excellent school & the excellent college I herded her toward over years of deplorable circumstances, now is working in a furniture store & planning a marriage in March as no nickel-&-dime affair; again I cannot imagine how I shall pay for it but the point is that it is all an extension & an entirely logical one of her concept of my concept of her as a person. Of course it’s different children & wives; but once one grants that inhowfar different is it?
Inflamed at the moment perhaps by 2 friends of 30 years, each in his 50s in a second marriage to younger women (2 small children in one case & 3 in the other) who are pulling out to ‘find themselves’ & honestly, both these men are attractive, generous, just so essentially hard working & decent & going through what I did 12 years ago over Sarah & Matthew but don’t think I could handle it a second time at this age as they are faced with doing. I mean God damn it John did the word ‘fairness’ disappear from the language when John Kennedy aptly observed that ‘life isn’t fair’: isn’t it one’s place here then to try to redress that unfairness insofar as one can rather than join it? join the the forces of Chaos in other words?
I know it is absurd even insulting to be writing such things to you whose capacities for generosity decency &c I’ve known all these years beyond most, know it isn’t their (Judith’s) fault, know that it is a part of a major historical readjustment for which no single victim or knife-wielder can be blamed, ‘blame’ itself having gone out the window with the bath water. But with it I’ve got to say sympathy too. Notice of course that my ‘responsibility’ references to Sarah & Matthew above both take the shape of money; but I know & you know, perhaps more forcefully here than in England but really throughout the West, that this in these situations & those that follow is the prevailing, recurring, constant reality; that at our ages it means weariness, debt & starting again, & being plainly expected on all hands to start again, to follow through on the responsibilities one has in all good faith taken upon one’s self. So frankly John I’m a bit sick & tired of people stepping out to ‘find themselves’ coming up at last with too often, in Cyril Connolly’s exquisitely harsh phrase, ‘a cheap sentimental humanism at someone else’s expense’.
Extreme cases, extreme judgments (another hand-me-down from the Judeo-Christian mess), I still feel strongly about it all though most of the agony of my situation with Judith is exhausted, she writes that she feels she can’t come back till she can ‘be very sure she can return my love & give me all the things I want & need & deserve &c &c’, each of us fearful of letting the other down which is finally pretty ridiculous & the last roe of shad, as my mother used to say, regarding the Protestant Ethic. At this point I can see it going either way right to the grave, the real problems here—& those which brought all the foregoing to a head I think—being my anxiety-ridden outlook for any income whatever after this teaching stint ends at Christmas approximately; & really worse that I have no work of my own & haven’t for a year so the 4th or 5th whisky doesn’t get that down since it’s not there, simply not one damned idea after the terminal obsession of J R that holds enough interest, enough passion, for me to sit down to it with any sense of sustaining these things for long enough to complete it, to resolve it. Though perhaps looking back up the lines of words I’ve dumped upon you here there may be something, a latter-day American version of Waugh’s Handful of Dust perhaps which I’ve always admired & may now be mean enough to try to write.
Thanks for your letter, and again for your efforts on Matthew’s behalf. As Graham Greene said, It’s a battlefield. But not Conrad’s ‘The horror. The horror . . .’ Not yet,
with love to you both,
Willie
‘The windows [...] with rain’: a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, first recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1967 and by many others thereafter.
Connolly’s exquisitely harsh phrase: see note to 4 May 1948.
Waugh’s Handful of Dust: 1934 novel about the breakdown of the marriage between Brenda and Tony Last, the latter concerned with maintaining Hetton Abbey, an example of Victorian Gothic. This is the earliest reference to what would become Carpenter’s Gothic.
It’s a battlefield: title of an early novel (1934) by the British writer. ‘The horror. The horror’: Kurtz’s dying words in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902).
To John Napper
Piermont
17 January 78
Dear John.
[...] —bad news seems simply to dwindle into worse. Judith is firmly bent on getting out, but not empty-handed; is, in fact, right now upstairs packing up bits & pieces of heaven knows what 10 years accumulated, still seems to have some notion of a ‘separation’ rather than a ‘divorce’ though I can’t put in another year of this sort of life & so everything—as everything must in a property-oriented capitalistic culture—seems coming down to property settlement which promises to leave me with even less than I thought I had. I’d hoped I could simply unload the Fire Isld house, take the money & pay off some of the worse debts & make a fresh start but of course it is suddenly not that simple at all &, on the other hand, totally time consuming for all its utterly unproductive aspects so needless to say not word 1 of anything written, let alone another ‘novel’, or obviously any income at all. I suppose it’s simply got to go its course here & must come out one way or another in a matter of weeks.
I do wish I had something more resembling cheer to offer, of course it is dead of winter (my neighbor’s ice-covered tree just crashed through my terrace fence out here but I believe his insurance company doesn’t countenance ‘acts of God’ —Christ, where will He strike next?), a storm just taking shape outside now & I’m sure the stars are in their most vengeful configuration. [...]
Willie
To Sarah Gaddis
Piermont
31 January 78
Dear Sarah.
[...] I liked very much your line you tossed off (meaning as something you really simply know, rather than a bright revelation) that ‘praise does nothing after a while except generate frustration’. So you know I’m not just being false-modest cynical when all I really feel is frustration when I read in a piece on Mailer in the Partisan Review (v. highbrow intellectual mag): “For all his (Mailer’s) bravura so far he has become our main man of letters. But he is not the first novelist of his generation. That title belongs to William Gaddis; Joseph Heller is a contender, and Ralph Ellison has been a promising challenger for twenty years. These men do not write novels in a couple of months, or even a couple of years . . .”
But maybe I’d better sit down & try to write a novel in a couple of years. Just once, as I keep saying, once I get the fragments of “real life” reassembled. I quoted to Matthew something that Douglas Wood said once (in fact it was during the agonies of your mother’s & my separation involving you both) & Douglas said “Did you think it was going to be easy?” Meaning life; & I had to admit that yes,
I probably had. Progressing now, 12 years later, to John Sherry’s rather more wry comment on each new catastrophe, “Life never lets you down.” A sense of humour is, as I’m also sure I’ve said a thousand times, really a sense of proportion. [...]
love always & best to Peter,
Papa
piece on Mailer: George Stade’s “Mailer and Miller,” Partisan Review 44.4 (October 1977): 616– 24. (WG quotes from p. 623.) Stade had reviewed J R for the New York Times Book Review.
To Cynthia Buchanan
Piermont NY 10968
7 February 1978
Dear Cyndy,
What I loved about your long letter is its sheer energy & excitement with what you’re doing & trying to do—what we’re trying to do—in this absurd ego pastime we’ve chosen & even still appear to expect to make a decent living at, it’s an excitement I’ve just started to try very hard to recover & I wish to heaven you were here today & I could actually again see & hear that intensity your letter brings to such life in an empty house in a blizzard with only the damned silent cat’s illiterate gaze for encouragement.
I should say at the outset what I should really have said back when you mentioned that you planned to read J R over Christmas; but was pleased enough & flattered as I simply didn’t think the next step, which is that I think it’s really not a novel for anyone to read who’s closely involved with writing one, as I suppose can be said of any book with an extreme style which J R has to a greater extent than I really realized when writing it, just thought: set myself a problem & see whether I can solve it (the only way I could sustain
my own interest in it long enough to finish it), & the devil take the hindmost. But surely it makes sense too that in creating & pursuing & living day & night with characters of one’s own, the last thing one needs (or should need?) is a raft of them dumped in one’s lap by someone else in a style either so impressive (Didion) it invites frustration, or so miserable (J Suzanne &c) it excites envious ($) contempt, none of which helps when one sits down to the blank page in the morning.