I’ve got to say I think it’s a shame you came out only $1500 ahead in the move to Knopf, I encouraged it & of course the reason I did so was I just assumed that the money would be a really substantial rise, so I do hope at the least that that’s the case when you do turn it in. Aside from that—the $ I mean—I don’t think you should let it get to you when a publisher presses you for the finished work. It’s finished when you’re finished with it & if he can’t wait, with as good an agent as yours [Lynn Nesbit] there are always other houses, each move assuming you’ve got more of it done so there may be more money which, as we know, may be all you’ll ever see. I don’t mean you specifically, this bloody problem of high praise on the one hand & wanting really, aside from the royalties if one can ever honestly make that aside, ‘to reach more people’, is the real one. When J R won the National Book Award my son said, —Well you know Papa, what the NBA means to most people in America is the National Basketball Association . . . & how right he was. It was even said that the NBA could give the book an elitist seal of approval that would keep the ‘common reader’ away in droves & Christ, how J R cries out to be heard by the mob, not just doctoral students. Well hell, it’s an old complaint isn’t it. After all it did get me a trip through the Far East (& even recent mention in the Partisan Review as ‘the first novelist of his generation’) so I guess I am like the barmaid’s view of the man who wouldn’t have it with the mouse & wouldn’t have it without the mouse.
About ready here to end up like Edw. MacDowell himself, sitting on the floor & cutting out paper dolls —but then that’s why his widow set your refuge up isn’t it, after nursing the results of the way America treats its artists. (And Sweet Briar, heavens! my mother’s college, what’s it come to . . . ?) Problem here right now though is less one of art than ‘reality’, agonies of divorce emptying the house (though after a year’s separation for practice) & however unique & all-absorbing to one’s self less news than a wedding to anyone else & God knows let’s not have another novel about that! An editor I once knew said that any book worth reading had been written out of indignation; & while that’s rather too sweeping (think of how many bad ones for the same reason) it does have an appeal that—from the sound of your letter—should hurl you right back to the typewriter. A difficulty I suppose with a bit more age & a bit more experience is summoning that indignation to surface yet once more & for long enough to sustain a fiction to embrace it, so the problem’s to get one’s head together & onto what will ‘reach more people’ now the vein of sex has been so exhaustively (& exhaustedly) mined, politics done in by ex-politicos cashing in from prisons, the evangelistics (& God go with them) (& stay) done up long since & once for all by Elmer Gantry & even death itself yielding right & left, madness & suicide to a fare-thee-well. What remains? Obscenity had for centuries been the dependable component (for ‘reaching more people’) in our Protestant Ethic but now that it’s been robbed of sexual content by the beaver-shots littering every news stand where does it turn? Maybe J R was right. From the present lumber room jammed with nothing but debt, real estate, lawyers, stock certificates, gas bills—maybe money really is the last obscenity & one we’re so used to handling it never occurs to us to wash, again v. J R but perhaps (for ‘reaching more people’) offered at somewhat less length & complexity than that dear boy felt pressed to carry it.
Forgive the lecture, I am just continuing to try to sort out my mind & here at your expense. I hope you can resist letting the pressures of time which you seem to feel so strongly drive the real pressures of what you are trying to do & think worth doing up the wall. Thanks again for your letter & kind wishes especially appreciated right now; I’d already enjoyed you on John Wayne in Cornell Review, a really steller issue: you, Gass, & Joy Williams who I think is awfully good.
My mailbox just blew away. I hope that is not a portent.
more affection,
W.G.
trip through the Far East: in 1976; see 21 February 1984.
man who wouldn’t have it with the mouse: joke about a man who finds a mouse floating in his beer, which he won’t drink even after it’s been removed. Jack Gibbs uses the line in J R (404).
Edw. MacDowell: this detail of the final years of the American composer (1860–1908) is mentioned in J R (43, 225). His widow founded the MacDowell Colony for artists, where Buchanan was staying at the time.
Sweet Briar: a women’s college in Sweet Briar, Virginia.
Elmer Gantry: Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel about a Midwestern evangelist; nevertheless, evangelism plays a part in WG’s CG.
Cornell Review: issue 2 (Fall 1977) of this short-lived journal includes Buchanan’s essay on myths of the Old West, “Oh, Won’t You Come Home, John Wayne?” (91–111) along with an essay by Gass and a story by Williams.
To Judith Gaddis
Piermont
Sunday 5 March [1978]
Dear Judith.
Freddie trudging up the hill in a snowstorm to leave in the box (which has blown down) your letter of kind endearments among the bills & a preliminary copy of settlement from Weinstock which he’d sent to your lawyer: & they tell me that irony is outmoded in fiction. But I was terribly relieved from your letter that you are getting into better shape than when you left here, I’d called your mother in fact a week or so ago to find out since I’d never really known whether you’d driven down with her or flown or gone on to KW [Key West] or what.
No nothing ‘promising’ has occurred here since you left. I finally put the stairs back together realizing I badly needed just to do something even if only that, painted the panels dark green, mothballed the cubby closet, took laundry & your things to the Thrift Shop. A call from Berkeley asking me out there for a week in June but that is June & this is barely March. I finally gave in to a fellow who’d been calling me from the Times Op-ed page to write something & called it in but like everything I do it was overlength & if they do want it I don’t know if it’s even worth cutting, done again like the stairs just for something to do certainly not the money: $150 which doesn’t even approach the gas bill. I never heard anything more on that Ohio film project or from a couple of people I’d hoped would come through, am now working on a switch which if it works out would at least get me out of this immediate hole I’m in that’s just got deeper every day, though of course it will get me into another one.
Sounds like all the negative thinking you fled here & stacking it up I guess one could hardly blame you. But right now it’s just quite difficult to grasp long-term alternatives with the relentless distraction of these immediate pressures dictating the good chance of using poor judgment, as this switch I’m trying to work out may prove to have been. All this because it finally got through my head what a real watershed between past & future this is: that if I can just surface from this current mess, get up Matthew’s tuition & get Sarah through her Event [wedding] just 3 weeks hence that abruptly & all at once, with you gone & Sarah under new management & Matthew well on his way, for the first time in 22 years I shall have no one for whom I’m directly responsible. Or even to. That then once I sit down & try to sort out how to pay off the banks & you & the dentist & find out whether these pains are kidneys or liver or both it’s all totally altered; as I say it took me a while to grasp but considering the proportions of it I can’t be surprised since those ties & responsibilities have been the day & night fabric of my entire adult life, & here’s the glimpse that comes as a man grows older of entire freedom on the one hand & not being needed anymore on the other, what life eventually appears to be all about, & that it’s something to grasp & act on rather than letting it creep up. All this I suppose too why I was so relieved from your letter that you’re getting health & housing & work together down there because oddly from the habit & guilt of a decade even though you walked out on me the marriage the house a year ago I was still ridden with the sense that somehow it was I who had abandoned you. I know a lot of this you’d been trying one way & another to tell me but in the recent agonies & monstrou
s circumstances it’s taken me this long to put the pieces together, in ways Matthew and Sarah have been trying to tell me the same thing I think & maybe getting the elements of the disturbance together are a first step to resolving it. [...]
W.
Times Op-ed page: “In the Zone” appeared on March 13, 21 (RSP 33–37).
as a man grows older: since WG admired Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno (see note to 14 May 1981), this may be an allusion to the Italian novelist’s As a Man Grows Older (1898)
To Cynthia Buchanan
Piermont, NY 10968
2 April 1978
Dear Cyndy,
Well I read the Guggenheim list in the morning’s paper & was terribly disappointed—though certainly far less than you—at not seeing your name there, kept looking back at the B’s as though to force it into existence. Cold comfort I know, but I found only one novelist at all —do they think it is an outmoded form? too chancy? Does Ned Rorem really need money? Do we really need another critical biography of Mozart? The only 2 people I know on the list both live down the way here in Sneedon’s Landing, hardly a ghetto area. Well again, these lists never make much sense unless one’s own name appears in them but I am sorry really that yours didn’t. [...]
What a hell of a winter this one has been & how enchanting that first warm day. Sum total nothing, though I think a glimpse of returning sanity. Briefly I thought I was escaping Knopf, where I’ve shown nothing (nothing, dear, to show), but my refuge fell through just, of course, as a hungry young type on the coast wrote for possibly optioning J R for a (television I think) movie, all that beginning to look quite sketchy just, of course, as a call came from someone in London named Jack Gold, sounds like a bookie but checked out he really is a producer so we’re trying to sort that number out now, small enough option money but at least money, and perhaps even something ‘real’ happening at last. That’s been the damned trouble, fiction being crowded out here by real-life dramatics while I pursue the cat asking What is worth writing a novel about these days? Even money has paled (in proportion I suppose as its intense demands have increased). So I went up to Boston & got my daughter married, all aglitter & now she’s under new management my son’s coming through this week on his way, I understand, to California with a companion named Carol whom I haven’t met. As Sherry says, Life never lets you down. Otherwise no plans but a week at Berkley in late June where they asked me for one of these workshops you loathe, as I may have mentioned in an earlier letter, but there’s no way I won’t need the money by then & a chance to see why the other half lives. [...]
great affection always
Willie Gaddis
Ned Rorem: American composer and diarist (1923– ).
Jack Gold: British movie producer (1930– ). There is a Mister Gold involved in a scam on Elizabeth Booth in CG, perhaps a meaningless coincidence, perhaps not, for no movie version of J R ever materialized.
see why the other half lives: a sardonic witticism uttered by a character in R (753).
To Ólafur Gunnarsson
Piermont, NY 10968
3 April 1978
Dear Olafur,
I enjoyed reading the pages from your new book, many thanks for sending them. It confirms what you said about J R not being uniquely American: I guess it is the same everywhere, people stuffing their bellies and their pockets, every man for himself. I wish the market for good fiction were better here, but it seems simply to be going the opposite direction, very much affected by television I’m afraid which is not a ‘communication’ medium but an advertising medium and as such aimed at the lowest common denominator in the consumer audience. I don’t know what the answer is, but that writing what one thinks is worth writing is a rough way to try to make a living.
best regards and good luck,
William Gaddis
To John and Pauline Napper
Piermont NY 10968
10 April 1978
Dear John and Pauline.
Well! I had a call from Sarah from Boston yesterday, she had just got back & could not say enough for you both, your friends, England, castles—all seems to have been one of the best experiences of her entire life to now & it all pleases me more really than anything I can think of: essentially that she does have this effervescence, this capacity of excitement for life which your hospitality kindled to its height, & at my parental remove I am eternally grateful goes without saying.
Otherwise . . . well, otherwise. Your generous concern & thoughts for me & the cottage there (all which Sarah reviewed in rapturous terms) as the likeliest place to start, though this will not be a review of emotional agonies: as you know, there is nothing like financial collapse to mitigate dental, marital, even renal (associated with lower back pains) difficulties. Not collapse really but massive readjustment, problem that that takes time & in the US as nowhere time is money (ie interest). The essential readjustment being the realization that abruptly & all at once—as I may even have written you before—the coalescence of Judith gone, Sarah married, & Matthew well on his own way, it looks for the first time in my adult life that I’m not directly responsible for, or to anyone. [...]
Point is I’ve got rid of most of the despair & am now just desperate: you understand the distinction. Finally beyond the angers, resentments, jealousies &c involved with Judith’s departure, beyond either wanting her back or not wanting her back & finally just concerned for her wellbeing with or without me; also finally able to grasp that what she is trying to do does take a good deal of courage & I know she is having a difficult time both for work & supporting herself, & loneliness, & coming to terms with the real consequences of her move.
The ‘desperate’, in sum, meaning the purely practical: debt, work, what to do about the Fire Island house, thoughts of renting out this Piermont house for a while &c & the ‘work’ being at the heart of things & most problematical. I suppose it has a lot to do with creative lag, the attempt to rekindle one’s fires after the dampened blaze of J R but I’ve simply not yet got any grasp of a central idea for another book of the obsessive proportions that kept both other books going & made all other considerations secondary. In large part of course it’s that all those considerations—Judith, wedding, debt, unrealized expectations for work—have crowded to the front for this past year & I can’t really think clearly enough to sit down to the selfish occupation of writing until they are fairly resolved, one or another of them occupying every waking moment. (The paradox, the essential absurdity being of course that the most pressing of them, debt, could be resolved if I simply would sit down & really get another novel going. But perhaps you can understand it is not simply a matter of volition.)
In other words, & to get back to your cottage where all this took off from, it would be the ideal if 1) I had a project in hand with a life of its own begun; & 2) if I had resolved these practical issues of debt, rentals, furniture &c &c. The one ‘real’ item on the horizon is a week in late June I will go to California myself for one of these writing ‘workshops’, not something I at all want to do but the $1500 ‘honorarium’ is not to be gainsaid, God knows, also the brief enough change of vista. And again, even though Judith has encouraged me to feel free, do anything & anywhere I wish, it is terribly difficult still to break a 10-year habit of feeling responsible for someone especially feeling that things are not going very well for her. I know that my deciding the divorce step hit her quite hard but after her having been away a full year, & then wanting only a property settlement & indefinite separation agreement, moving directly toward divorce seemed to me the only way to bring to her the reality of what she was doing.
Still I know, as reflected in your thoughtful & sensible letter of a year or so ago John, that it is something she feels she has to do in order to discover & grasp who she is; there is certainly no rancour from her side for me, quite the other way in fact; but while the thought of her becoming a casualty of our life & times is almost unbearable, it becomes at last a case of (Heraclitus?)’ ‘To see clearly & be able t
o do nothing’; & the reality seems to be in the effort not to let this spill over & paralyse the areas where one can do something, the mundane, quite un-unique world of work, property, rentals & mortgages & taxes & debt.
And so if I could grasp a little more realistically what I have just written here, I would be a little further on the way to resolving things that can be resolved & which only I can resolve. That at any rate is the direction I am trying. [...]
love & best wishes again,
Willie
Heraclitus [...] do nothing: pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (c. 535–c. 475 BCE); his observation is one of Jack Gibbs’s handwritten quotations on p. 486 of J R.
To David Markson
Piermont
17 April 1978
Dear David.
Thanks for having your Lowry sent to me, I can’t say I’ve read it or even will in the immediate future because obviously I’ve got to sit down & face the long postponed reading of Lowry’s book itself first. (From a glance though, if representative your approach to investigations by others (p. 216 §3) seems to me exemplary.) Anyhow Times Books does appear to have given you the attractive format & jacket that makes it look like it will be around for a while. Which is all we can ever ask (the rest being, as Eliot remarks, ‘not our business’).
good luck with it,
W. Gaddis
your Lowry: Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning (Times Books, 1978).
p. 216: perhaps WG means the remark: “no individual commentator is ever going to produce a ‘definitive’ explication of Under the Volcano because the depths and echoes in the book would appear almost infinite.”
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