24 January 1987
Dear Judith,
well this time you should really read the book to the end if only because it doesn’t end (note no period at the last page) which in a way is what it’s all about (though I don’t plan a sequel) but since I’m off on this there are a few points of ambiguity which for the ‘reading public’ (Ch. Lehmanhaupt) I’m glad to leave that way, having always said You can’t go running after your book saying what I really meant was &c . . . but after some of the reviews I’ve got to realize that perhaps some points were more obscure than I’d intended although (1) I thought it clear enough that Liz, bad health, talk of high blood pressure, obviously alone in the house when she goes down, that the robbery was committed earlier, her head hits the table (‘blunt instrument’), kitchen’s orderly enough but when she’s found next morning (Mme Socrate has been told to come very early) the floor is strewn with placemats &c (Mme Socrate had seen where she kept her household $) & finally the check cashed in Haiti, obviously (I thought) she rushed back there into the dark & had a fatal heart attack, but too many read it that Paul killed her! Poor fellow, again reviewers finding him mean bad brutal &c where I found him desperate confused desolated as much or more a victim as anyone & his dependence (not simply $ly) painfully clear upon her & the last person to do her in as the FBI (& similarly dimwitted or only careless readers) adduce; then (2) is (as many inferred) McCandless ‘mad’? spent some time in a hospital though what sort is only implied, may have had a breakdown? but I didn’t think ‘mad’ unless I am which may be the good question; finally the point I think probably everyone missed so I must take some blame, wherein at the last where the woman shows up & introduces herself as Mrs McCandless this is not Irene but his first wife (old enough to have a 25yr old son) and that, muddy enough I admit, she & Liz each mistake the other for Irene who is never more than the constant presence haunting the house & McCandless, & Liz who in effect moves into Irene’s role in her desperate attempt to rescue her own shattered identity. So there it is. I’m finally resigned to the apparent fact that I shall never reach ‘the man at the airport’ but perhaps some doctoral students will be kept busy with it. [...]
And I’ve been fortunate finally I must say & as you probably know from Rust & others if only I would just cut down on the drink & quit the smokes as I’ve been postponing these 10 years. So I am being dragged somewhat reluctantly by circumstances to start another book though fortune keeps interrupting: where those 12 years ago indicting ‘free enterprise’ abuse got me that trip to Japan, with the last book indicting just about everything else the USIA invites me to go to Australia too good to turn down, aside from all that all goes calmly though I am appalled how the time passes as one grows older. I did appreciate your message, Key West seems 1000 years ago & I’ve often enough thought & hoped things have gone well for you there but not written since this is quite simply not a scene that encourages correspondence, otherwise though happy to hear you sounding well & bright as I remember.
with love,
W.
To Mary McCarthy
[American novelist and crirtic (1912–89), an old friend of WG. She taught one semester a year at Bard College from 1986 until her death. “Leon” is Leon Botstein (1946– ), President of Bard since 1975.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
4 February 1987
Dear Mary,
finally just a note of regret that I never managed to get up to Bard during your reign there, I talked to Leon who sounded elated with you[r] efforts and I must say all things considered how I admire you for taking it on and carrying it off. But what busted up our fall plans was an invitation to Sofia from the Bulgarian Writers’ Union, where we heard the US denounced and vilified by 200 ‘writers’ from 50odd countries though we did get a stop in Paris to see Sarah now in probably her last year there (and just harried to move to 6 rue de l’Assomption (chez Foisnel), 75016).
More and more amazed at how fast time passes and the sense of the past devouring the present as though frantic to consume it, we see Liz Hardwick and hope to see you both somewhere along the line,
very best wishes
William Gaddis
Liz Hardwick: Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007), American critic and fiction writer.
WG in Paris. Top: with his daughter Sarah on the Île St.-Louis, Quai de Bourbon, 1985 (photo © Mellon Tytell).
Bottom: at Odile Hellier’s Village Voice bookstore, with Ivan Nabokov, actress Dominique Sanda (who read from CG), and Christian Bourgois, 1988 (photo by Flavio Toma).
To John and Pauline Napper
12 April 87 (can it be?)
Dear John & Pauline.
Well we are back from all things Australia whence perhaps you had a picture postcard? & New Zealand which is quite stunning especially perhaps after Australia, I don’t for a moment mean to be unkind everyone treated us splendidly & we didn’t after all see such great attractions as the Great Barrier Reef &c but the sheer green of NZ & the people with a little of Maori showing through rather more seductive than Australia’s good white cheery USA brawn: what it was all about was our US govt information agency sending me out to talk for USA as I wished & did about “writing”, the dissident tradition in American literature (my theme) &c &c to a point I never want to hear my voice in public again, ready to drop out with the Trappists or better perhaps get back to this damn typewriter where I belong. [...]
But at any rate the rather gorgeous news from [Sarah] is that all this while, 3 years? that she’s been working at her degree from Parson’s design school there in Paris she has also (really) been working at a novel on the sly, I hadn’t a word of it though I knew she was trying at stories but here she comes to my agent (again without my interference) who is very struck thence to a publisher ready to “make an offer” as they say, imagine! All I know of it is that it’s somewhat ‘autobiographical’ (as all first novels but mine?) so may read myself into a doddering well meaning drinking & smoking old fellow on the boardwalk—perhaps I hope for too much?—at any rate something of hers done quite her own & what better for that vital self regard, any money (though never) aside: point is it is really damned difficult for a ‘young person’ (how she hates that description) to get a first novel up front & for the ruthlessness of NY publishing I know no favour to me, the connection may simply have got it read faster but that’s all. [...]
Our immediate next steps are quite unclear but for the 90% likelihood of renting out the Long Isld stylish/Oblomovka place for the summer, Muriel’s asthma not at all good there last year + the endless round of cocktail/dinner ++ the rental itself which cannot be discounted especially with the end of my MacArthur, I can’t believe the 5 year term of it has passed! So I must get down to another damned book trying to echo Sam’l Butler’s —I do not look for them, they come to me wanting to be written . . . for which I’ve got plenteous notes but no Page 1 Chapter I so for June–September must seek a place for that hope & having heard myself chatter in the antipodes some silent peak in Darien all yet to be resolved, which may even end up right here in Manhattan with a terrace & all air conditioning that people kill for hardly that bad after all though glimpses of peace over the bay at Wellington & sheep of Christchurch lead one astray where Butler after all got his first breath, as against the glimpse from our pedestal of how much time is left where I must say your both example of courage & good cheer sets me a mark. (I have just now been drinking whisky & reading again Howards End which may account for something?)
love & all the rest,
Willie
working at a novel: her novel Swallow Hard was published by Atheneum in January 1991.
Oblomovka: the title character’s estate in Goncharov’s Oblomov.
silent peak in Darien: the final line of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816) finds him, like Cortez, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
Butler: in his twenties Butler immigrated from England to New Zealand to set up a successful sheep run.
Howards End: E. M. Forsters’s 1910 novel.
To Donald Oresman
[Accompanied by a draft of “Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount et al,” published in October in the New Yorker, and eventually in FHO (30–40).]
Wainscott NY 11975
6 May 1987
Dear Donald Oresman,
Barbara W. gave me your home address with word that you haven’t been as well as might & certainly should be, & I thought you might be diverted by the trouble I’ve got myself into with the LAW.
All innocently—as anyone confronting the law cries out—drawing upon (not as a co-conspirator such as we read about these days) your generous Case Book and Prosser as well as my 250 lb. AmJur, I set out on this troubled sea where the artist’s small boat arrogance rows against the tide of sentimental greed with the distracted results attached.
Now in the doctrine of res ipse loquitur (misused on p. 2) it should be clear that the octogenarian Judge Crease is 1) somewhat senile, 2) enjoys writing opinions for the sheer writing of them, and that 3) in the course of the projected novel—in which this is very much of a subplot—his decision must face, indeed invite reversal on appeal. Well I’ve shown it to a couple of lawyers and even a county judge & clearly in its present form the judge should not only be reversed but certified. Making matters worse, as matters can only be made, I light heartedly showed (not submitted) it to someone at the New Yorker who, with a little ‘fixing up’ (literary not legal, to make it a ‘story’) at the end, is enthusiastic for its possible publication. Oh Lord.
Because heaped upon this our month’s trip to Australia, and the accumulated trivia that has devoured time since, leaves me now trying to get back to it thoroughly muddled over the generous critical suggestions by these lawyers & judge: not a temporary injunction but restraining order; “the standard for preliminary relief must first be addressed”; the infant James B cannot be sued but must have a guardian (ad litem?); get copy of Harvard Blue Book for rules of case citations etc; the disorder of dismissal of charges related to the case itself and the order of procedure from the original complaint, the hearing (is this judgment the result of a hearing?) to trial, appeal & God knows what, (speaking of co-conspirators).
Do you know that John Irving for his novel Ciderhouse Rules involving abortion actually took a course at Yale on obstetrics? A sobering thought in this context but for the moment I send this along to you for as I say some kind of diversion, disruption of equally absurd oppressions.
with warm regards,
W. Gaddis
AmJur: the set of American Jurisprudence Oresman had sent him.
res ipse loquitur: legal Latin (should be ipsa), “the thing speaks for itself.”
ad litem: a person appointed by the court to act “for the lawsuit” (ad litem) on behalf of another.
Harvard Blue Book: The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, compiled by the Harvard Law Review Association et al.
To Candida Donadio
Wainscott NY 11975
19 July 1987
Dear Candida.
Here is the card that of course never quite got mailed at its source, the stunning island where some farmer dug up the Venus de Milo (the Milos Aphrodite they call it); but then all the islands were stunning, Naxos, Thera, Kea, must have been 8 or ten Cyclades we called on, if ever I went 1st class all the way it was this trip, the only curse my short breath climbing ruins & the shipboard cough, got to do something about it as I’ve been saying for 10 years.
It was another 2 weeks away from the typewriter but worth anything even though I haven’t a place for it in ‘the work’ (but may of course always squeeze one in); & now, in this clean simple tree-surrounded air-conditioned-if-I-want-it studio there remains no excuse but laziness for my not finally really getting down to work. Of course the Sifton/Knopf number adds spice doesn’t it! added to Mehta’s enthusiasm for the last book at Picador to say nothing of Sarah’s loyal diligent efforts, if only she & I had the current high taste for vulgarity just picture the DAD & DAUGHTER photo feature in People magazine . . . But it does, touch wood, look like everything is falling into place after those God knows how many years of tormented uncertainty every step of which you were painfully aware & never gave up.
Maschler! Well splendid, good news, always remembering his handling of the J R cash & contract to which Sarah herself was of course privy at the time as I pounded the deck at FIRE ISLD shouting for money to pay the grocery bill as the pound sterling fell, and fell . . . so however good his offer if accepted we must keep him on a short leash. Marvelous. (And Deutsch? Picador?)
As I get my work in hand here this next month or so I will let you know & we can plan ‘strategy’—I’m probably worth more to Elisabeth at Knopf than I would have been at Viking? &c&c&c . . . (& just to crown everything, Gottleib OUT).
Love from the catbird seat,
Willie
a place for it [...] squeeze one in: WG squeezed in a reference to the Melos Aphrodite (as it’s more properly spelled) on p. 34 of FHO.
Sifton/Knopf number [...] Mehta: in 1987 publisher Sonny Mehta lured Sifton away from Viking to join him as executive vice president of Knopf. “A self-described perfectionist,” writes Thomas Meier, “Sifton alienated some of her colleagues almost from the start by sending a memo at Mehta’s suggestion to then chairman [Robert] Bernstein about the inefficient ways that manuscripts passed through Knopf” (Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, and Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It [St. Martin’s, 1994], 219). The British paperback edition of CG was published by Picador, which Mehta headed before he went to Knopf.
Maschler: see note to 29 May 1976.
Gottleib: in 1987 he left Knopf to edit the New Yorker.
To Arthur Kerr Brown
[A student of Elaine Safer, Dr. Brown had written to Gaddis while working on his dissertation “The Past as Prologue: A Study of the Allusive Techniques of John Barth and William Gaddis” (Univ. of Delaware Press, 1989).]
Wainscott NY 11975
19 July 1987
Dear A.K. Brown.
Thanks for your letter & continuing interest in my work. I don’t know how practicable your notion of getting together to discuss my work may prove to be, after some recent travel I am pretty much settled out here on the tail end of Long Isld making every effort to get down to cases on another book with the usual distractions which I’m trying to keep to a minimum & a long trip from New York (let alone North Chatham) & quite honestly cannot afford the time to get into a correspondence about past work as I trust you will understand. The ‘sources’ of Carpenter’s* Gothic seem to me quite evident in the book itself as opposed to other aspects of it (such as the gap between ‘the truth and what really happens’) which, again, I don’t want to elucidate except—as a good example—the query in your PS: the Boston Globe is just about as good at getting it right as it was reviewing The Recognitions 30 years earlier. An entire theme of Carpenter’s Gothic embraces getting it wrong, as Paul exemplifies, & in the end Liz is the only person who does get it right & in a world where getting it wrong prevails (‘contras’ = ‘freedom fighters’) she must be eliminated. Of course reading her as a murder victim is nonsense & the most obvious instance of getting it wrong, by the police the papers & your Globe reviewer: your interpretation clearly gets it right as numerous evidences plainly there in the text attest.
Let me know if you’ve similar specific queries & I will try to respond in brief, always bearing in mind I feel strongly that eventually the interpretation is the reader’s, that one cannot/should not try to run after a book saying ‘What I really meant was . . .’ &c though the Globe interpretation you refer to above was simply too egregious (&, in its way, a part of the book itself) to let pass.
Yours,
William Gaddis
*Note the title’s apostrophe, not Carpenters as you have it.
Boston Globe: Mark Feeney found it “apocalyptic, topical, heavy-handed, a kind of jeremiad.” R was unfavorably r
eviewed in the Globe by Edward A. Laycock on 13 March 1955, 72.
To Sarah Gaddis
[Wainscott, NY]
21 July 87
Dear Sarah.
Enfin! The first day in, how long . . . since February I think, of total pace, silence, solitude [...] & here I sit in my air conditioned studio with no obligations in sight but the blank page in the typewriter, a feeling you may now empathise with! And of course all of the recent obligations have been of the best: go to Australia; your visit; isles of Greece . . . perhaps something in my bleak Calvinist soul saying Stop these pleasures! get down to work!
And again, how abruptly the future becomes the past, how the present devours it, how it all speeds up as one grows older: how Australia loomed, how your visit excited, how the Aegean and those Greek islands are now themselves an island in a sea of memory; & how, on that very sea I was already writing you in my head how quickly come and gone your visit here, & did we make the most of it sitting silent, reading in this glass living room, ‘living every, every minute’ as your old favourite Our Town had it, & I think we must have. I suppose it is all haunted for me, and so for you & for Matthew, by those fleeting visits & abrupt separations after school Tuesday and Thursday at the old house at Croton (little pies from Ritchie’s homework), the Budin camp, the trip back from Saltaire, the Sunday pm drive from Piermont to that grey Greyhound station in New Haven, in which of course I invested all of my own childhood: the train at Grand Central to Berlin Connecticut age 7 & the desolation of every town along the way as the lights went on: your mother once said in one of her fits of pique & I suppose for good reason —I will not have you living these children’s lives for them! But apparently that’s what we do & perhaps not too bad a thing after all if it does lead to some kind of understanding of our own childhoods & the pain & love of those around us then in their efforts to save us, or better to try to equip us to save ourselves, rehearsing all those cheerful embraces at train stations, bus stations, airports, and the desolation that followed, & the loneliness constantly racked by —Did I do the right thing? As I look back on that winter you put in alone at Pennington & think now How could I have permitted it! And so somehow it all becomes an examination of our childhoods & strangely enough the more so as one grows older—I’ve talked with Saul about it & in fact at this moment Sigrid is in Germany seeking clues to hers—underlying my 4th novel as it does your first: do we want to write novels & simply use this material? or is the attempt to sort all this out what drives us to write them.
B007RT1UH4 EBOK Page 61