To Steven Weisenburger
[A professor at the University of Kentucky who contributed an essay entitled “Contra Naturam?: Usury in William Gaddis’s J R” to Money Talks: Language and Lucre in American Fiction, edited by Roy R. Male (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 93–109.]
Wainscott, N.Y. 11975
18 September 1981
Dear Steven Weisenburger.
I ordered (prompted by A Broyard’s most grudging mention in his NY Times review), finally received & have just read your piece on J R in Money Talks. Generally I have resisted responding to reviews or critical pieces with notes either of thanks or indignation, but in this case feel obliged to let you know that I read yours with pleasure and appreciation. Self serving as this must inevitably sound, given your bias for the book, I did find your approach, your informed analysis & exploration of the themes, & your conclusions, (& a most coherent style), to be extremely gratifying, & confirming that what I thought I had put there is really there.
This last I suppose provoked by this cursed word inaccessible which has haunted both these Big Books & far worse in the case of The Recognitions 25 years ago. Oddly enough things seemed to be reversed with J R, where what one might have feared as ‘provincial’ reviewers—from the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Hibernian—sailed right through & had a marvelous time whereas a ‘serious critic’ such as Steiner seemed to take the whole thing as a personal affront &, finding it unreadable from the outset, went right on to review it anyhow to prove it was unreadable: some sort of contradiction, or non seq, or oxymoron there somewhere. The only piece that really annoyed me was John Gardner’s thoroughly dishonest job in the NY Review: jauntily challenging Steiner’s charge & finding the book immensely readable in order to set it up for his own sloppily contorted conclusion (a common stunt of his) as totally negative, Art (pure) the victim of (dirty) Commerce &c &c. (Ah Bartleby! Ah moral fiction!)
I only mention Gardner here because his egregious pose in seizing the wrong end of the stick is too typical of the simplistic stupidity that has found my work entirely negative (incidentally, as you may have noticed the titles on p. 515 of J R are anagrams of The Recognitions & all of the blurbs (except for delicately evocative & yummy read) are from reviews it received); whereas your grasp of the Art/Commerce relationship, & of seeing Bast shaped as triumph, are of course what the whole damned book is about. Just as (your p. 95) everything outside Art diminishing in worth, the counterpoint of Bast’s diminishing vision of his talents from grand opera to cantata to suite to finally the lonely piece for cello is refinement rather than the defeat that carelessness reads in, & the fact that this is all the triumph needed. In this whole area I find your insight immensely heartening.
Now what follows may be simply carping but I hope, in the light of my appreciation of what is of real importance in your piece, that you’ll see these items supplied simply should you ever want to reprint or expand it. Clearly they also reflect my own constant concern that it is my fault when such details are mis-taken when I’d thought them clear to a serious reader.
Ergo: foot of p. 95, a Long Island (not a Brooklyn) school; 96, 97 Amy Joubert is the daughter of Moncrief [sic]; Cates is her great uncle; 97 he buys picnic forks from the Navy (J R 169) not Air Force, sells to Army; 98 (& I’ve always regretted that I didn’t make this more clear) last lines J R on the phone, I don’t understand where you got J R anticipating a tour of college campuses; what he’s really got in mind is some undefined career ‘in public life’, ie politics in which Bast again presumably will ‘help him out’, though how he could manage such a thing is purposely left unclear: point is J R has ‘learned’ in terms of shifting his view of where the power lies in this junk world which is to say he’s learned nothing, and will persist.
One item I apparently made clear to no one unfortunately since, while a prank like The Recognitions anagramed, contained more than that but I don’t believe anyone saw it there so clearly my fault, & damn. It’s this: the lettering over the school entrance, proposed by Schepperman, was Marx’ FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY &c; when the school learned this ‘communist’ they were alarmed & Gibbs stepped in to the rescue by simply having the letters altered to ‘look’ Greek, as here:
Also, p. 99 (J R p. 142) while Bast is echoing the Ring motif on the piano the lines he’s declaiming (Rift the hills. . . Rain or hail! &c) are from Tennyson’s Locksley Hall.
Also liked your rescuing the passage (your 103) regarding the unfinished book/terminally ill patient to which you give the interpretation intended (compare Gardner’s distortion).
Finally I have got to thank you for never so far as I recall writing me with questions, queries &c since 1) I just have not time to respond to those things which often come in in some detail & can’t afford the correspondence they anticipate, & 2) have always tried to hold to the stance that the work is on its own & I cannot pursue it saying —This is what I really meant . . . (or That is not what I meant at all . . .) but mainly 3) what you accomplished without my help (read interference) is in so short a space so succinctly & well done that I am in your debt,
Yours,
William Gaddis
Regarding Broyard’s Times review unfortunately the short shrift he gives you (in a very odd statement) is I’m afraid really meant for me: we’ve known each other some 30 years & I guess clearly aren’t pals.
Broyard: Anatole Broyard (1920–90) & WG knew each other in the Village in the late ’40s and were rivals for Sheri Martinelli’s affections, which caused some friction. He was the model for Max in R. See his posthumously published “Remembering William Gaddis in the Nineteen-Fifties,” New England Review 17.3 (Summer 1995): 13–14. He reviewed Money Talks in the 13 June 1981 New York Times, stating: “In his analysis of William Gaddis’s ‘JR,’ Steven Weisenburger manages to sound both ingenious and off-putting” (21).
Big Books: Weisenburger begins his essay: “William Gaddis is the author of two Big Books. By this designation I mean that The Recognitions (1955) and JR (1975) stand in a brotherly relation to Moby-Dick, Ulysses, The Sot-Weed Factor, and Gravity’s Rainbow” (93).
Bartleby: Weisenburger quotes Melville’s “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” as the impulse behind such Big Books as WG’s. Gardner wrote a book entitled On Moral Fiction (1978).
EBOM [...] &c: handwritten first with English letters, then gone over again to make them appear Greek.
To David Markson
Wainscott NY 11975
26 Sept 1981
Dear David,
I’ve been out here since September began & our mail connection with NY is tenuous, it gets here eventually only when someone stops in the NY apartment & notices it & postpones forwarding it or brings it out in a heap.
So this may be too late for your Guggenheim application, where you may use my name. My past testimonials have generally been brief & have accumulated a list of no-wins; also I have noted a greatly declining number going to fiction writers compared to the old days, compared to film music & academic projects, all capped by what I would think must be a greatly augmented number of applications because of threats to federal state &c funding for the ‘arts’.
Good luck whatever,
Willie Gaddis
To Johan Thielemans
Wainscott, NY 11975
8 October 1981
Dear Thielemans,
thanks for your letter which I just had forwarded here, unfortunately some 100 miles from New York so I’m afraid I’ll have to miss you this trip & should like to have heard more of the happy episode of Gass in Ghent. That Balazy is a good tough minded girl, glad I could talk with her & most curious to see what she comes up with. Regards to Freddy deV, sorry nothing on tape yet but the day may come,
best regards
W. Gaddis
Teresa Bałazy: see 8 January 1980. She had by this time published an essay entitled “A Recognition of The Recognitions” in Traditions in the Twentieth Century American Literature, ed. Marta Sienicka (Adam Mickiewicz University Press, 19
81), 23–33.
Freddy deV: Freddy de Vree (1939–2004), Belgian poet and radio producer; conducted an interview with WG in 1988.
To Tomasz Mirkowicz
[A Polish critic, activist, and translator (1953–2003) who, while visiting the United States, interviewed WG with a professor from Columbia named Marie-Rose Logan. The interview was translated into Polish and published with the title “‘Kto do utworu przychodzi z niczym . . .’: Z Williamem Gaddisem rozmawiaja” [“If You Bring Nothing to a Work . . .”: An Interview with William Gaddis], Literatura na Swiecie 1/150 (1984): 178–89. Mikowicz began a Polish translation of R at this time but eventually abandoned it.]
Wainscott NY 11975
7 November 1981
Dear Tomasz Mirkowicz.
I’m sorry to be so late about responding to your letter, but have been spending most of my time out here in the country & mail forwarding hasn’t been dependable.
So far as the interview goes, I think it’s just fine & see no reason to make any changes, as I told Marie-Rose Logan when she called a week or so ago. There are a few word changes here & there which are probably simply errors going into the English translation (as toward the foot of page 4, engendered should read endangered?), but I’m sure you & she will straighten this entropy out.
It also has occurred to me to suggest to you my making use of the interview if you have no objection, even though there is ‘my condition’ in it that it not appear in English; but I do get these requests frequently enough to be distracting even annoying so if such a moment comes along & you don’t mind, I might make such use of it (would of course say interview conducted by you & translated from the Polish which would sound nicely exotic here).
Regarding fiction for your magazine, the only material I have right now is what’s written of the book I’m working on and, since what I have is still in a first finished draft I don’t especially want to see it published. I haven’t yet incidentally heard from the Jarek Anders you mention with the magazine with the excerpt from J R, I’ve been as I say at the address below (and probably will until the end of the month, back in New York in December); but there has been someone at the 73rd street apartment so I hope the material hasn’t got lost.
Finally, I’m sending your name along to a professor at New York University who has written me about a book he is getting together of critical articles on both my published novels, & you might possibly hear from him (his name is John Kuehl).
with best regards
William Gaddis
excerpt from J R: Jarosław Anders’s translation of a section of J R appeared as “Symetryczny ruch wielkich kół” in Literatura na swiecie 3/71 (1977): 132–91.
To John R. Kuehl
[Kuehl wrote to WG about his plan for a collection of essays on his work, to be edited by Kuehl and myself—Kuehl originated the idea, then invited me to coedit the work after he learned of my forthcoming book on R—and asked if it would be possible to include an interview as part of the book. The collection was published in 1984 as In Recognition of William Gaddis (Syracuse University Press), but without an interview.]
Wainscott NY 11975
[9 November 1981]
Dear John Kuehl.
I’ve just had a note from someone in Canada opening thus:
Hello Mr Gaddis. I arrived home Saturday with a stirring book by Alfred Kazin: Bright Book of Life, American Novelists &c. And I find you are not even mentioned. I extend my warmest congratulations . . .
So of course you are aware that there are many enough out there who do not share your (& Steven Moore’s) most generous opinion of my ‘body of work’ (though here for one I have never understood how Kazin’s relentlessly self serving pomposities have kept him afloat as a ‘prominent critic’).
At any rate of course I am intrigued by the notion of Moore’s extraordinary effort and your projected one together, my feelings mixed as always (‘shameful neglect’, yes: my last royalty statement from Harcourt was something like $11.48; while another part of me cringes at ‘most important single body of post WWII fiction’ . . .) Which is why I suppose I’m still reluctant about interviews, had recently in fact an aborted attempt from a most well meaning fellow [Tom LeClair] from Cincinnati (sp?) which I felt turned out rambling and poor & of course ended in pain & recriminations &c. As though somehow perhaps my acceding to your request would make it appear that I’d promoted the whole thing (there were those in fact back in those days who told it around that Jack Green’s marvels, including a full page ad in the then new Village Voice which he executed and paid for, were my doing under that pseudonym). But it would clearly be mean spirited for me to refuse in the face of your & others’ generous efforts. From fragments of past experience though I feel it would be more satisfactory all round if you sent me some questions and I laboured out answers, not for mistrust of your approaches but of my own; & that it all come out fairly brief?
I’m fairly unaware & generally startled (shameful neglect notwithstanding) when I hear of activities going on concerning my work, witness your letter. But some items come to mind which may be of interest or use to you.
Did you come across a book called Money Talks (Univ Oklahoma Press 1980, ed. Roy Male) with a piece on J R by a Steven Weisenburger? I wrote him a note of thanks & he in return says he is writing a piece on both novels for an editor named John O’Brien who is putting together a special issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction on my work for 1982. All news to me. (If you want to reach Weisenburger he is at 271 E. Maxwell, #4; Lexington Kentucky 40506)
Then there is a Jay Fellows whom you may know or know of, at Columbia I think, said he was going to do something on my work possibly a book, he’s a rather intense & self directed fellow & I don’t know how he’d regard an inquiry if you were so inclined & don’t have his address out here but his phone is 749-0208. He has a ladyfriend name I recall as Ann Douglas who I think teaches some of my work up there.
Finally for your entertainment I enclose a page of a letter from a man in Poland’s (state run I assume) publishing scene, I’ve apparently a diligent following in Warsaw & did give him an interview of sorts provided it not appear here.
I am out here probably through November & mail to here or the NY address you have gets to me sooner or later.
With best regards
William Gaddis
Bright Book of Life: a study of American fiction from Hemingway to Mailer, published in 1973.
Review of Contemporary Fiction: the issue appeared in the summer of 1982; Weisenburger’s “Paper Currencies: Reading William Gaddis” appears on pp. 12–22 and was reprinted in In Recognition of William Gaddis, 147–61.
Jay Fellows: author of two books on John Ruskin; he was invited to contribute to the book but did not submit any work.
Ann Douglas: a professor of American Literature at Columbia, author of many books and essays on post-World War II American culture.
page of a letter: the page from Mirkowicz was not included when Kuehl made copies of his letters from WG for me.
To John Large
Wainscott NY 11975
21 November 1981
Dear John Large.
Most apologetic about this long delay responding to yours of 22 October; first because I’m out here on the tail end of Long Isld & mail forwarding from the NY address is sporadic, next because I glanced at your letter & put it aside to read & answer eventually without noting your request regarding a reference to Princeton, so I hope it is not too late for me to say of course, if you’ll let me know where & to whom there ($19G is a rather hefty bundle!)
And thanks for sending along your magazine. Your first excerpt a bit gamey for me (as I suppose the 2nd too): though I do of course remember the 2nd when you were labouring at its earlier version which I recall as a good deal more strained, & this—while the ‘subject matter’ cheers me up no more than it did then—I find far far improved & evidence that your sweating out those early writer’s agonies, frustrations & paralyses have given you more
than any amount of ‘teaching’, ease & authority & simply moving people around.
I am not that much further into but working on another & rather more bland, or as the reviewers’ word has it, ‘accessible’ novel, God knows. I cannot recommend the profession unless one does start out ending up with it as the only game in town.
During December (down our throats) we should be more often in New York & might see you there if you pass through, meanwhile for the moment the address below, glad to know you’re in one piece & pass along a greeting to K Begos from me,
all best wishes
William Gaddis
your magazine: Dyslexia, coedited by Large and Kevin Begos.
To Steven Moore
[This and many of the letters that follow have to do with assembling In Recognition of William Gaddis. I wanted to reprint Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards! there and asked Gaddis how to locate him.]
Wainscott NY 11975
1 December 1981
Dear Steven Moore.
Regarding Jack Green: I saw him last only a year or so ago & the last address I have for him is: PO Box 3, Cooper Station, New York NY 10003, otherwise no idea how you might find him, he did have an address on Bowery but I don’t find it listed. But I hope you may find him & won’t go further now (& of course I vastly appreciated his efforts on the book’s behalf) than to say he was a very pre-hippie, made his living then & may largely still as a ruthlessly efficient proof reader (free lance). In that regard it might interest you to know that he & I did meet somewhere back then, very early 60s? since he’d turned up a number of errors, mainly minor & typos, in the original edition of The Recognitions. I had these from him when the Meridian edition was being done around 1962–3, and the editor of that series stripped in the changes generously enough (he is Aaron Asher, now ed. in chief at Farrar Strauss & Giroux (Robt Giroux incidentally was nominal editor of the book at Harcourt Brace, left very soon after when Jovanovitch took the place over; so the book was originally published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., not “& World”, let alone “& Jovanovitch”).
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