No I have not written other ‘letters to editors’. No I did not see my picture in People though have been bantered about it (by people who read People). Thanks for the Ansen effort; only he would manage an original Hong Kong publication, others being pirated.
I have just signed a contract with Alfaguara (Madrid) for both books in some hereafter considering the translation challenge; also with V-Penguin for a trade softcover of The Recognitions sometime in a year or so.
You may hear from a William Ray, whose weighty doctoral dissert. on my work for University College London (though he’s in Boston) I’ve just returned to him looked through but unread since I cannot at this stage take that time though it looks impressive in its range & construction. He wondered about publishing where I’ve no advice for him but thought you might be interested in what he’s done.
We were pleased to learn of your coming east & if it’s feasible would like you out here for a couple of days’ visit, an easy express trip from NY &—barring the increasingly remote chance we rent this place out—will probably be here into the foreseeable fall but let us know about August, meet the luminaries, charlatans &c & we’ll let you know if any inconvenience arises: 516-537-0743 when you get in.
I forgot to mention the jolly (& deserved, really) dedication in your & John K’s book.
Yours
W Gaddis
Mrs Kask: a woman who worked at Meridian, recipient of an unimportant 1962 note excluded here.
Kenner [...] Harpers: Kenner’s “Writing by Numbers,” Harper’s, April 1981, 93–95.
People: his photo appeared in the 4 June 1984 issue, p. 50, illustrating an article about the annual meeting of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, into which WG had just been inducted.
Alfaguara: Los Reconocimientos, translated by Juan Antonio Santos, was published by Alfaguara in 1987, but they never published a translation of J R.
V-Penguin [...] The Recognitions: Penguin editor Gerald Howard arranged to reprint both R and J R to accompany the publication of CG in the summer of 1985.
William Ray: William Vincent Ray,”Transformations of Modernist Fictional Technique in the Novels of William Gaddis,” PhD diss., University College, London, 1984.
visit: I visited him in Wainscott 18–21 August 1984. He had just finished CG and allowed me to read the manuscript, which I raced through in a day, to be grilled that night about the plausibility of certain plot elements.
dedication: “For Jack Green.” Green wrote a letter to Kuehl (and sent a copy to WG, which he showed me during my visit) expressing outrage that we had not requested permission first, and interpreted it as an insult on my part instead of the homage I clearly intended it to be. He requested that it be removed in any future printings.
To Sarah and Matthew Gaddis
8 August [1984]
Like old (& worser) times: DEAR SARAH & MATTHEW,
Well I finished it. Not really of course . . . a nice folder of notes of items to squeeze in when it goes to galleys but at least I did put a whole 2nd draft in the mail to Viking & now up to them to start the machinery; & even at this rate some question whether they can publish it before fall 85! Now how can you make a Major Motion Picture in like 8 months & it takes them a year to print & peddle a book, it’s beyond me. But as you know my main purpose is to get the damned Thing out of my life & I am close to doing that. Et puis? 3 more years of (blessed) MacArthur so maybe I can just sit and play with my toes—but I do want to get right to these revisions & then think.
Aside from that daily horror (why I haven’t written you, or anyone) the usual: saw Under the Volcano last night, a virtuoso perf. by Finney but still a book there was no reason to make a movie of (including that wimp who had the teddybear in Brideshead from whose every pore untruth exudes . . .) then a hoho burger at “Van’s” with Gloria, Kennet, Polly & Joe, Ellen Adler; this eve. to cook chicken thighs at Sag Main with Woods, Sherrys, Saul? Jean Stein? Gigi still very wound up & no knowing where it will lead.
In town for a day & dinner with Martin who is so mad at everybody he’s ever known that he’ll outlive us all. [...]
But I did see Passion finally (Gigi brought one back), not only good fun but a good piece on “Whatever Happened to the Great French Novel?” (July issue) (what happened is they just don’t sit down & work) but it is a snappier publication than I’d expected, all to the good.
I know I’ll become too impatient for news of you both to resist calling before you get this, most curious regarding Matthew in Paris & ‘the work’ of course!
love to you both
Papa
Under the Volcano: 1984 film adaptation of Lowry’s 1947 novel, directed by John Huston, starring British actor Albert Finney and costarring Anthony Andrews, who had won acclaim for his role in a TV adaptation of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited a few years earlier.
“Van’s”: Bobby Van’s restaurant in Bridgehampton.
Gloria [...] Ellen Adler: Gloria Jones lived with Kennet Love; see 25 August 1980 for Polly and Joe Kraft; painter Ellen Adler was the daughter of actress and teacher Stella Adler.
Saul [...] Gigi: Saul Steinberg (see headnote to WG’s second letter of 21 January 1990) and his partner, photographer Sigrid Spaeth, who committed suicide in 1996.
Jean Stein: American author and editor (1934– ), and a Wainscott neighbor.
Passion: Paris Passion, an English-language magazine published in France.
To Bill Morgan
[American literary historian (1949– ) who specializes in the Beats. He invited WG to contribute to a festschrift for Allen Ginsberg, eventually published as Best Minds: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg, edited by Morgan and Bob Rosenthal (Lospecchio Press, 1986). Responses from those who declined to contribute were published in a companion volume entitled Kanreki: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg, published the same year by the same press. WG’s response, a postcard without a salutation, appears on p. 47.]
[Wainscott, NY]
9 Aug. 1984
Though I saw Allen cordially this past spring, I hadn’t for quite a good many years & the days when we met have been amply attended to surely in the Kerouac saga & elsewhere, so I’ve really nothing to add but my good wishes,
W. Gaddis
To John and Pauline Napper
Wainscott
11 Sept. 1984
Dear John and Pauline.
Some of the excuses follow but none can really excuse my not having got off even a line to you in what is an age. So much seems to have happened & indeed much of it has.
Most recently these past few months have been devoured by Carpenter’s Gothic . . . good guess! Yes that’s the title of my ‘new’ novel, why in God’s name it should have taken me so long to finish & doubly infuriating since were it out today it would be selling hotcakes, its main concern being precisely the far right political USA’s entanglement with the evangelicals, fundamentalists &c filling our pre-election front pages. It can’t be out till next year when we’ve either got a new & sobre Administration or Reagan’s reelection, in the latter case it may well be news (as all signs point) so there’s nothing to do but vote democratic & hope for the worst (Reagan). The title because in part it’s a patchwork of used ideas, borrowed & stolen, with what simple materials were to hand (hammers & saws) in the way of outrage at ‘revealed truth’ (read Genesis), erected on a small scale (about 250pp.); but also because the entire book takes place in that Piermont house (where of course The World comes in by telephone) . . . some rather heavy handed satire & flashes of poor taste but it ‘moves right along’ as they say & should offend enough people to move it in what we are pleased to call the marketplace (supply side). I very seldom go up there but do still own the Piermont house, rented out for barely enough to carry itself but my ‘workroom’ still cobwebbed with most of my books & papers with no other home despite comfortable quarters indeed here on Long Isld & in NY, Muriel’s dowry? but not a damned inch to store anything. At any rate every sobre minute has gone into final
ly last week handing over to Viking Press the entire rewritten, corrected, proofread MS with vast relief.
& what took so much time? Well partly of course getting deeper immersed in the book, which started out as a ‘romance’ but I found needed outrage to fuel it, ergo fundamentalism &c. And life itself, mine & theirs . . . Sarah’s divorce a sticky number but finally accomplished & she’s now been in Paris for a year, doing design, fashion & drawing studies at a branch of the American College there (connected to Parsons) & also some side paying jobs; & though it’s exactly a year to the day I haven’t seen her seems to be in great shape & Growing Up (panicked of course that yesterday was her 29th, feeling the hand of Age descending (can you imagine!)). And Matthew {***}. Pretty wild for the 2 children of one of the most tried & true Francophobes you will find . . .
Well now at last blessed relief (‘famous last words’ as your old saw has it), we plan going to Rome for November & December, have got a room at the American Academy there which will assuredly not be lavish but at the least provide refuge from that operatic people while we sample their remains; been in such odd places as Bankok & Libya (shades of David Tudor Pole) but for some reason or none, never Rome. And there for the moment it all stands; the heavy shadows of drink (not drunk but certainly to be cut down) & tobacco taking a serious turn & if humanly (me) possible to be ended, the new ‘creative challenge’ [...].
Willie
To Robert Minkoff
[I was widening my efforts to collect WG’s letters and had written to Robert Minkoff to request copies of any he might have. Minkoff wrote to WG for permission to release them to me.]
American Academy in Rome
Via Angelo Masina 5
00153 Rome
12 Nov. 1984
Dear Robert Minkoff.
Your 20 August letter finally reached me and I appreciate your thoughtfulness in this what is at heart an idiotic matter. This fellow Steven Moore has already published 2 books on my work—very straight & diligent & appears headed to be my sympathetic “chronicler” like it or not.
My letters—& I think no one’s—are written for publication (unless they are in which case they’re probably full of lies); legally I believe the letter (as an object) belongs to the recipient (or anyone he sells/gives it to), while its contents remain property of the one who wrote it (ie regarding publication). I’ve long suspected that my papers, letters &c. would eventually bring more money (not necessarily to me) than royalties on the books themselves, & I say “idiotic matter” above because this is apparently happening—some university in Canada I understand has paid around $900. for a handful of my letters (not of course to me). Thus there’s a price tag on what you hold in your hand as you read this!
Ergo ——what’s the rude solution? write someone a letter, send her/him a xerox & keep the original? The letters are yours, to keep, burn, sell, give to Steven Moore, or 2 of the above —ie send Moore xeroxes & keep, burn or sell the originals. It’s all madness. (I understand 1st ed. of The Recognitions, once remaindered at $1.98, now goes for $450.)
best regards,
William Gaddis
To Johan Thielemans
235 East 73 Street
New York, New York 10021
7 January 1985
Dear Thielemans,
just back from 2 months at the American Academy in Rome to find galleys of C****’s G**** waiting, now ‘corrected’ (with almost negligable changes) to take in to Viking tomorrow & find out their schedule for it, also for their (Penguin) reissues of J R & The R*******s all early summer I believe. I don’t know their prospect for bound galleys but if I can lay hands on one will send it along to you.
In my absence here a few things have come up regarding this spring to which I must respond & so would greatly appreciate hearing from you as soon as conveniently possible where the Orleans possibility stands & inhowfar I should consider it as a realistic spring prospect or not.
Forgive this haste plowing through a mountain of mail (bills) after chiseling through the stunning exhibition of computerized typesetting (typos) (ie the worst sort, that for than &c)—having just read that Mme Tolstoy copied W** & P**** 7 times, & presumably in Cyrillic at that?
with best regards,
Gaddis
To Sarah and Matthew Gaddis
New York, NY
10 January 1985
Dear Sarah & Matthew,
16o here my, it is cold! & I read you folk in Europe are enjoying similar agonies, I hope you both have heat. [...] I’ve delayed this thinking I’d be able to send you bound galleys which should have been ready by now but Elis Sifton has to write a long kind of blurb (to help reviewers so they can review the book without reading it) & hasn’t yet done so, another week or 2 . . . Meanwhile I went down yesterday & turned in my set of galleys corrected & with negligable changes; the only hitch remaining is Viking’s lawyer who may want me to change some passages as coming too close to Jimmy Swaggart but he was away yesterday (in South Dakota fighting a suit by an exgovernor there against Peter Matthiessen for saying he’d once raped a 10year old Indian girl or some such since even in South Dakota that might damage his chances for reelection. Also a long splendid lunch with Candida who of course has found a very expensive Italian restaurant in the new neighborhood she’s moved her office to (West 22nd street), full reports on Rome &c.
I try to go out & ‘walk’ (for health) but 2nd Ave no treat after the Gianicolo. Mainly preoccupied thinking I must seriously decide and get started on Another Project, but what. Especially after just having painfully written a letter to LSU (Louisiana State Univ) turning down or at least postponing their invitation to me to come down there & direct their writing program, salary (hold your breath) $55 thousand! was I a fool? 8 months in Baton Rouge? Arguing one way no, the whole point of The MacArthur is to free one for a while from such necessities to do one’s ‘own work’; on the other, really just a good excuse for laziness? Joyce Carol Oats teaches doesn’t she? & has just published her 16th novel . . . ouch. But I will go down to Univ of Delaware just an overnight, give a talk &c; and a week at Bard in June. Haven’t as yet heard anything about the Orleans number for spring. Maybe I’m secretly thinking something $ly exciting will happen with the new book. Fool! [...]
Sarah I am taking a liberty for which you may or may not thank me: a note from Catharine Carver saying she is in Paris for a couple of months at something called Trianon Press & I’m sending her your number. She is really now what she always wanted to be, an old eccentric English lady of letters . . . [...]
much love
Papa
Jimmy Swaggart: fundamentalist preacher (1935– ) at the height of his popularity at that time.
Peter Matthiessen: American novelist, nonfiction writer, and environmental activist (1927– ); Governor William J. Janklow and an FBI agent named David Price sued him and Viking to suppress his book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983).
Gianicolo: Italian name for the Janiculum, a famous hill and location of the American Academy of Rome.
$55 thousand: $120,000 today.
Joyce Carol Oats: Oates (1938– ) has produced a prodigious output while teaching at Princeton.
Univ of Delaware: at Elaine Safer’s invitation, WG judged a fiction contest and delivered a talk there on 1 May 1985. Miriam Fuchs and I took the train down to Wilmington with him; the talk was an assortment of observations, opinions, quotes, and jokes, delivered in an improvisatory manner from notecards.
To Steven Moore
[Having seen a limited edition of John Updike’s Harvard Lampoon writings (Jester’s Dozen, Lord John Press, 1984), I wrote to WG to request permission to edit a similar book of his. I also naively asked about the possibility of reviewing CG for the New York Times Book Review.]
New York, NY 10021
[28 January 1985]
Dear Steve,
sorry but the sheer gimmickry of publishing the Lampoon material leaves me cold despite your kind offer of time effort &c.
Bound galleys for the new book are being held up because of complications over permissions for the Jas. Hilton material which I’m trying to resolve now hence the haste of this. I think The NYTimes selects their reviewers as far as that goes.
Someone called my attention to the Delmore Schwartz passage which is at least thoughtful & straightforward.
WG.
Hilton material: the sections of CG quoting Jane Eyre (both the 1847 novel and the 1943 film adaptation starring Orson Welles) originally quoted James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933, film version 1937). The Hilton Estate objected to the erotic context in which WG quoted the novel.
Schwartz: in the just-published Letters of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Robert Phillips (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1984), Schwartz responds to Catharine Carver’s request for a promotional statement on R with a harsh critique of the novel (p. 298).
To Sarah Gaddis
[Handwritten in red ink on the first page of the revised CG proofs.]
New York, NY
14 March 1985
Dear Sarah———here finally are the page proofs & good God, I look at it & think 10 years? for this? Anyhow what a vast relief to have it out of my hands if not my life. I say I hope you “like” it but it’s not really a book to “like”—(a British publisher has just turned it down saying it’s “too painful”) I hope not for you & MttG; especially because I’m sure some literary “biographer” will one day—with the genius talent they’ve got for misinterpretation, getting it wrong (which is very much what the book’s about as you’ll see)—write that the brother & sister, Liz & Billy, are “obviously” drawn on you & Matthew. Absurd of course, but even more to the point was when I realized, & only quite recently! that this troubled younger brother, his beautiful & doomed sister, and her husband the man trying desperately to win a place in the world, are recreations of the 3 main characters in my aborted Civil War play—Once at Antietam—which you’ve never read (don’t, it’s terrible) which I was working on at 2nd Avenue when you were about 5 & Matthew 4, so clearly those characters were formed before you were. But it is odd—or perhaps not so odd: someone has said that every writer writes the same book over & over again—to discover that somewhere in one’s mind, one’s fabricated memory, that the same characters & their relationships exist, whether the war is the Civil War or Vietnam. At any rate I hope I’ve read it for the last time; it’s not a book I finished in the high spirits I did J R or even The Recognitions, but that is probably largely the difference between being 32, or 52, & being 62. I’m sure you’ll come across some familar items—forgive me! but we take our material where we find it as you know & especially that which has touched us closest—in fact the whole passage where Liz talks about seeing herself as a child through a telescope light-years away [CG 153], grew out of my remembrance of the story of yours that of course touched me closest about the girl watching her father going down the walk at Fire Island.
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