Larry McMurtry: novelist and rare-book dealer (1936– ), whose novel The Last Picture Show (1966) was made into a successful movie by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971.
Herb Yellin: book collector and publisher of Lord John Press, which specialized in literary limited editions.
John Dewey on a Key West roof: the philosopher/educator (b. 1859) spent his final days there enduring a number of ailments before dying in 1952.
To Stanley Elkin
Piermont NY 10968
12 March 1979
Dear Stanley.
Climbing down from the St Louis high followed by the savoury of Notre Dame with just time at home between courses to wash out some shirts & calm desperate Max the cat, & wade through the otherwise trash heap of mail for The Living End: & it certainly is!
Why do we write? out of indignation? outrage? I had thought of pursuing that theme at Notre Dame & planned to pack along Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger for the purpose till I read yours & thought ah! here’s the news! And only on the plane, culling for inspired passages (‘He doesn’t accept invitations. He doesn’t go out. He stays home nights.’) did it occur to me that this was hardly the forum, hardly my place to divert them from the medium to the message as it would inevitably be interpreted, & so I desisted not, I hope, from cowardice, but . . . what, delicacy? That & trying not to ride (living) coat tails, my next note on these lines to John Macrae III at Dutton explaining I don’t think blurbs sell books any more than reviews do & I’ve never got past the feeling that so many of them are sheer self-advertisement on someone else’s jacket (what keeps the Kazins of this world alive?): God knows I thought of sending Dutton something like “A delicately evocative novel which urges us to lay aside our fears and realize our true strength” but that seemed hazardous for a number of reasons, so I’ve retired to the notion (which I do embrace) that all that sells books, movies & similar aberrations is word-of-mouth & I’ve a busy one as you know; anyhow I can’t believe the book won’t be taken up immediately as slamming the door that Twain opened on eschatology once for all, its street wit is marvelous & its brevity admirable.
All this backing & filling scarcely seems an expression of my real & lasting thanks for all your generosity on every level while I was there, the whole thing helped to restore a feeling of having a place in this world which it seems to take no more than the publication of a book to deprive me of permanently. I noticed that you seem to get around a good deal & if anything brings you east I’d hope you would call, granted I don’t lay a table in a class with Joan’s but the will & the drink would be there; or even if you were just in New York itself I’d race in for a visit.
thanks again to Joan for feeding me &
carting me around & my best to you both,
Willie Gaddis (Capt.)
The Living End: Elkin’s triptych of novellas, published in 1978, concerning the afterlife.
John Macrae III: Elkin’s editor.
Kazins: critic Alfred Kazin (1915–98) wrote a dismissive review of J R in the New Republic, 6 December 1975, 18–19.
“A delicately [...] strength”: one of the mock blurbs that appears in J R (515).
Joan: Elkin’s wife, a painter.
To Richard Hazelton
[American medievalist (1918–2009) and professor at Washington University who had written to WG twenty years earlier to express his admiration for R.]
Piermont NY 10968
12 March 1979
Dear Dick,
I’m just finally getting my head together from St. Louis-followed-by-Notre Dame: it’s all enough to seduce one permanently from the drudgery of the keyboard to the parade circuit, given the generosity that greeted me everywhere; it does seem a generation since we cowered under that Arch & ate Mexican & I thank you for all of it. Including dinner with your bright girls: whatever fooleries & futilities one has committed along the way it often seems (to me, having come this far) that a great deal is redeemed if one can point to one’s kids with —There at least is something I did right . . . Do thank them again for me.
That evening brings up another, or rather the only point left unresolved when I fled town. You recall I’d thought we were in for a 35-mile drive both ways for dinner which I looked for as a chance to get at the movies in general & your stab in particular, so failing that dialogue all you have is this mono . . . I don’t know who isn’t knowledgably down on that whole scene these days as being more & more the closed province of fewer & fewer, & breaking into it harder every day, from the packaging nightmare on the one hand to the super-budget/super profits approach on the other. Any cheerful doubts on these lines I might have had were certainly dispelled when I met & talked at some length with Larry McMurtry at Notre Dame. His prescription for a ‘property’ (in the fast disappearing low-budget class): ‘a small flat book with a strong narrative line’ as, for example, The Last Picture Show, though his luck in the industry since hasn’t been all that great either, considering numbers of works optioned, scripts written, films unproduced.
Anyhow it seems a toss between the stranglehold of ‘the industry’ that gives us Earthquake & Superman, or the director with his own charisma like Altman who seems, in this last number with Paul Newman surviving the frozen wastes of the future, to have pushed his personal hand too far. And while for instance I’d had high hopes for his interest in & carrying off J R as I envisioned it, I think now he’s not much interested in anything but what he envisions. He is I think an extreme but good example of handing any director a script telling him throughout the impressions the writer wants to create, & how to create them, rather than handing him hard characters in a ‘strong narrative line’ so that he can create the impressions as he envisions them & make it his movie: a further problem too I would think when this strong narrative line isn’t very clearly evident to him right from the beginning, something happening rather than time taken setting up the scene & characters which I think directors consider their prerogative. So given those conditions, if they are so, plus the state of The Industry itself today, it all may just end you up writing the thing for your own delectation like the 200page ‘play’ I wrote 15 years ago which is still on the shelf (& which I am now seriously considering trying to turn into a ‘small flat book with a strong narrative line’ & let show business discover it there. ha.)
In fact once through the accumulation of items during my absence is cleared up I have got to get down to something more serious than dutifully reading the morning’s Times; but your & the University’s generous support has given me something resembling a fresh start & many thanks for all of it.
best to Fanny Hurst & to Mimi & to Alina if she drops in & to you,
W– Gaddis
Earthquake & Superman: big-budget films of 1974 and 1978, respectively.
Altman: Robert Altman (1925–2006), American film director. WG refers to his Quintet (1979).
Fanny Hurst: Fannie Hurst, the American novelist (1889–1968); the Hurst Professorship for visiting writers was funded from her bequest to Washington University, which she attended. (The other names are unidentified.)
To John Napper
Piermont
19 March 1979
Dear John.
Your letter here with its ‘mixed’ news when I returned from what I’ve got to call the parade circuit: 3 weeks at Washington Univ. in St Louis as ‘Visiting Hurst Professor’, then a briefer stint at Notre Dame all of it not only cheerfully corrupting to the ego but paid enough to get me to summer at least. Main burden of my ‘talks’ to students &c seems to have been warning them off of writing if they had glimmers of any other talent or even ability; & YOU can paint! But heaven knows John, I’m hardly one to talk (unless being highly paid) & the 40 thousand words you mention is no mere bagatelle. Lord knows there are certainly times (Trollope, Ouida &c notwithstanding) when one should give one’s art a rest—I haven’t disturbed mine for 2 or 3 years now & am only just considering a new assault—& turning from painting to embrace even so distant a relation as w
riting is certainly far better than turning from writing to embrace bottles & laughing girls. Or is it.
I’m only now getting through the items correspondence &c that accumulated while I was away, toward confronting the typewriter seriously again to discover whether an idea I’ve been nagging at is in fact a book that ‘wants’ (to use Saml Butler’s phrase) to be written, as it appears yours does: lovely torn-up feeling! Among my mail a note from Bard College cordially not asking me back for fall so at any moment here I’ll have decks & bank accounts cleared & have again to face the threat of new fictions, all that can save me from that the chance of Jack Gold’s extending a $-laden invitation to do a screenplay: after just about 1 year of haggling I believe we have got the Agreement about settled (I having made every conceivable concession from sequels to T-shirts); but of course he may have felt me to be such an obstructionist during our haggling (or rather our lawyers’) that he’ll simply want to take the property & run & never hear my name again; in which case even if he does pick up the option & really make the movie there’s no real money until 1981. [...]
love to you both,
Willie
Ouida: like Trollope, the English novelist Ouida (pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, 1839– 1908) was very prolific.
confronting the typewriter: in a letter to the Nappers two months earlier, WG wrote: “I don’t especially want to write another book but I guess finally that’s what I do is write books so I’ve got to get things together toward that end” (18 January 1979).
Saml Butler: English novelist Samuel Butler (1835–1902); in his essay “Erewhon and the Contract with America,” WG quotes Butler on his books: “I never make them; they grow; they come to me and insist upon being written” (RSP 86–87).
To William H. Gass
[Typed on Washington University English Department stationery, with a handwritten note “running low on these” and an arrow pointing to the heading.]
Piermont NY 10968
3 August 1979
Dear Bill.
Surprise! Surprise! I certainly was, to open the elegant 2vol. inscribed set of Les Reconnaissances (a catchy title too, as a Hampton friend lately mentioned her appreciation of my earlier book The Recollections); & I’m sorry to be so long acknowledging, but have been ‘away’ hiding, as I say, from the literary brilliance of the Hamptons in a town nearby there, since nobody invites me to pose in Tubingen, Munich, Berlin, let alone Paris where, ‘alert and intelligent’ as you may find them, it cheers my prejudice to know that through your kind gift one less frenchman will get his hands on me.* The story of that episode is, incidentally, one of the better publisher-horror stories, & better saved to retail over a bottle. All of which notwithstanding it was immensely thoughtful of you & Hawkes & you know I greatly appreciate it.
Not having been asked to T, M, B or even P, we** plan to leave in a few days for Haiti, not that I’ve been asked there either but the fare is cheap & I hope to sit down for 2 or 3 weeks & try to fill 2 or 3 pages with an idea, concept, synopsis, what have you, for what Larry McMurtry describes as ‘a thin flat book with a strong narrative line’ (ha!) for my agent to use as an instrument to deliver me from Knopf’s & extort money elsewhere, the usual scam.
Another advantage to Haiti (as I assume all the abovementioned spots) is that one will not encounter that ass John Gardner in print, voice or leis, though it is perhaps unfair to burden his demented ego with what is essentially the mercenary ignorance of the NY Times to which we have all at last become accustomed. Well, as the Arabs say (translated from the Spanish): Sit in the doorway of your house and watch the bodies of your enemies pass. Speaking of that, Stanley must thank the Lord for small blessings: only think what the Master of Moral Fiction could have wrenched from The Living End. It was certainly splendid to see Dutton out there advertising it replete with blurbs that count, if any does, from reviewers, among which I would surely have appeared as a hitch hiker on his fleet vehicle. Boys howdy, what a darb of a car that was! I only hope he got a good reprint sale.
* My prejudices are notoriously flexible, ready to turn on a dime for a return ticket & refreshments, witness my great fondness for Berkeley/California.
** This plural embraces (sic) a Lady named Muriel Murphy, a high class rediscovery from those days before my first marriage, whose encouragement of my callow infatuation then would have deprived the world of Sarah & Matthew, so perhaps Mother was Right, perhaps everything does happen ‘for the best’.
As I finish footnote ** above, the ’phone rings with Muriel from NY saying a cousin may be leaving a house (staffed) in London for a few weeks so should we consider London rather than Haiti. I tell you.
What I tell you is if she & I are still speaking back from Haiti/London by September, the one perilous certainty is that I will start again Weds.-Thursdays at Bard (through Christmas); that between us she & I will have available —at Piermont, Manhattan, Fire Island & Easthampton, sleeping quarters between us for 37 people; that I am not entirely in control of anything as must by now be apparent; that if you* are anywhere near NY in the fall let me know here by mail or telephone, or failing the latter at her number in NY: 212-988-1360; & that failing all of it I’ll write when I get work,
best greetings to Stanley & the best always to you & Mary,
Willie
* Stanley too of course—
Les Reconaissances: the French translation of R, by Jean Lambert, was published in two volumes by Gallimard in 1973.
Tubingen [...] you & Hawkes: Gass, John Hawkes (1925–1998), and John Barth (1930– ) were on a reading tour of Germany.
Muriel Murphy: Muriel Oxenberg Murphy (see 23 November 1953), with whom WG would live for the next fifteen years.
To Cynthia Buchanan
Piermont
Aug. 4, 1979
Dear Cyndy,
I guess I never really believed you would actually do it: move out there [Arizona] I mean; but here’s your card from Cottonwood (& really postmaked ‘Cottonwood’) so it must be. I’ve got to say Wupatki national monument on the obverse doesn’t look like a place to cheer up anybody but I do rather long to see it all again someday —more than 30 years now since I rode that blue roan through those incredible desert nights up outside Tucson—but heaven knows when that chance will offer itself. [...]
Currently & as always confusion reigns, plans to get away for 2 or 3 weeks & try to get 2 or 3 pages together on a (shudder, gasp) new book at least as an instrument to escape Knopf & try to seduce a new publisher to make the same grand costly error 2 others have made. The only thing approaching certainty a renewal of the 2-day weekly stint at Bard in September, my heart rather sinks at the prospect as it always did when that chill month came round & sent me off to boarding school but it is, after all, income. [...]
love & best to you always,
Willie Gaddis
To Sarah Gaddis
‘Cormier Plage’ (Haiti)
13 August 1979
Dear Sarah, and Peter.
Well! if you ever want an inexpensive (for these days) vacation (though 12–330 pm the heat is simply sweltering) with nothing but the palm trees one way & the sea the other way (& we won’t have to catch any trains, & we won’t go in when it rains), a large room with terrace overlooking the water 40feet away (& the sound of the coral sea), hibiscus & bouganvillea (sp?) & everything immaculate, excellent food served in an open pavillion (sp!) or at a table under trees on the beach or indeed on one’s own terrace &, since it was once a French colony, ici on parle francais & the other guests are mainly french which lends it a somewhat even more remote elegance (if you can call topless ladies wearing only ‘le string’ elegant), beaming black Haitian faces on the maids & the boys hopping about in orange jackets, & above all PRIVACY . . . well this is it. We’ve been here only about 5 days but it’s like weeks.
Muriel is just splendid. We decided 4 days ago that it might be high time for us both to start a regimen of simple morning setting-up exercises, so I dutifully followed her d
irections 2 days in a row & of course my back went. So I am moving around like your great grandfather—though nothing as hair-raising (yet) as the entertainment I managed for you both on that Thanksgiving visit!—sitting right now on the terrace in a rocking chair a la Jack Kennedy & his back while she makes the trip into town. This is no joke: the ‘road’ between here & Cape Haitian is often no more than a path of jagged rocks & blind turns, every one of them threatening a jubilant Haitian at the wheel from the other direction, up the mountain & down. There’s no phone here so she had to go in to call NY & see whether her cousin (by marriage, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia who is rather a number, one of these high class exiles between London, NY & Richard Burton) has arrived in NY to stay in her apartment. Also to check on her daughter Julia & her gross husband Philip (God! how fortunate I am as a father-in-law!), who are in a mounting tizzy over the imminent (Sept 5) arrival in NY of the Dalai Lama, another high-class exile since China appropriated Tibet: M’s NY apartment generally acrawl with monks shut in a bedroom doing mantras or whatever they do (as someone remarked, A good mantra is hard to find) & so, what with Bard, & our summer house rentals ending, & even the chance of your appearance, September is quite a rousing prospect.
Meanwhile I am set up here working on this 3-page or so proposal for a new novel to give to Candida when I go back, discuss with her & submit to a publisher—still unsure which one but very sure which one not—for a new advance & a fresh start by the end of the year when Bard (& its salary) ends. The novel involves some bad news rich people involved in making a movie, money & trust funds & an inept murder plot or 2, the main point being that it be comparatively short & brisk & ‘accessable’ to the paperback audience reading level (or at least appear so till they’ve bought it & it’s too late), I’ll send you a copy of the proposal when it’s done, as fair warning.
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