Did I congratulate you on your new publishing arrangement & (I think) sensible flight from East Coast vendettas (though I doubt I could survive the trip), & wish you good luck with it.
all best regards
W Gaddis
Miles Davis, Baryshnikov: superb trumpeter and dancer, respectively.
Mr. Cuomo: Mario Cuomo (1932– ), governor of New York from 1983 to 1994.
To Sarah Gaddis
14 June 1989
Dear Sarah.
Another ‘souvenir’! But the evening itself was quite impressive, the ‘presentations’ in an auditorium at the Met. Museum by the Governor whose high praise for my work won me over to him completely & I would vote for him tomorrow . . . seriously though he is a very impressive fellow, sharp, quick, listens, humour &c, & then a very large reception afterwards in a vast Met indoor court (just off the ‘armour’ collection), lots of handshaking &c & I think Matthew had a ‘good time’, said he thought (as did others) I had made a very good (the best) acceptance brief speech (in which I thanked them for the award, then said I had been leery of awards ever since J R won the Natl Book Award which I thought might sell books though MHG told me most people thought the NBA stood for Natl Basketball Assn & then ‘my publisher’ told me the book was already pegged as elitist (ie difficult) & since the NBA was regarded as an elitist award it might frighten off any who still might have bought it). Lots of warm laughter. If there is one thing I have learned in ‘public speaking’ it is that audiences simply ache to laugh, give them any excuse to & they will. Anyhow now I have this heavy knee high steel sculpture which will go nice with my Schnabel portrait [...].
It has been pouring rain here day after day which has not helped my spirits sitting down to the typewriter, looking over what I’ve written so far & thinking about recasting the whole thing; piles of legal papers notes books & dismay that I have got in over my head again with maybe still time to get in and cut material before it gets into a floundering draft rather than after. I believe assume trust & hope that yours is in much better shape as it must be having got as far as you have & I hope able now as I’ve said to cut & restore some of the sharpness & dry wry observations of what you actually went through in ‘those days’ . . .
MHG is deeply involved in his film project (which I have not read), I only worry what is at stake as it is for you & was for me with The Recognitions and I guess all of us trying to do anything well of inevitably so much riding on it, with the fear (from my own experience obviously) of the day when the world shrugs or simply turns its back—but those are the risks we take. [...]
much love always,
Papa
To Paul Ingendaay
[German critic and translator (1961– ), brother of WG’s German translator Marcus Ingendaay (1958– ). Paul had sent WG his essay on his work, “Zauberer ohne Publikum” (Magician without an Audience), Schreibheft 32 (November 1988), among others.]
Wainscott, N.Y. 11975
[postmarked 25 August 1989]
Dear Paul Ingendaay,
a short note to thank you first for writing, and then for sending me, your pieces on my work. Of course I cannot read them, aber . . . my German being shreds of rote from 40 years ago the opening lines of your Zauberer ohne Publikum (Magician without a public? like the Mann ohne Eigenschaften? (whence we have Mr Eigen in J R)) reverberate with some Grimm moment in The Recognitions wo die Wünschen noch geholffen hat, lebte ein König, dessen tochter warum alle schön . . . well, there go my credentials but it sounds better than it looks.
I agree with you, of the 3 I prefer J R but largely probably because of how fond I became of the boy himself; but the most difficult I should think for translation though it is right now presumably going into French, and with less evidence Italian & Spanish as well, Spanish have done a very servicable job with The Recognitions. It seems odd to me that the Germans (or is it only Rowolt?) have such problems with me, they (Rowolt) gave the first book 2 or 3 tries about 20 years ago & gave up as too difficult; now I’ve understood decided to wait & see how this Erlöser fared in the marketplace before doing any others (which is good J R cautionary business practice). [...]
with best regards,
William Gaddis
Mann ohne Eigenschaften: The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil’s huge, unfinished novel (1930–43).
wo die Wünschen [...] schön: from the Grimm Brother’s “Frog King,” as quoted in R (273). See 17 December 1950.
To David Markson
[A postcard, without salutation or return address.]
5 Oct. 89
Only you can fully appreciate my son Matthew haunting the sites of young film writing aspirants, only to meet—to be invited to dinner by, in fact—yes, Harry Joe Brown . . . plus ça change, which I’m afraid will also go for your Guggenheim try. Meanwhile since Si Krim 2 classmates of mine have gone ‘on tour’ as we (the living) say. Sobering,
Gaddis
Harry Joe Brown: see letter to Markson of ca. February 1966.
Si Krim: WG’s old friend Seymour Krim, a highly regarded editor and essayist in the 1960s, committed suicide on 30 August 1989.
To John and Pauline Napper
Wainscott, New York 11975
21 December 89
Dear John and Pauline.
[...] How many times we’ve thought of you but the weeks the months even the years go by justlikethat each taking a toll, you remember my old and eccentric (though not really by English standards) friend Barney Emmart in September and 2 more classmates since while strokes and cancers and divorces abound elsewhere and one hesitates to ask are you well? and are you both well?
Approaching seventy (!!!) is nothing like I’d envisaged God knows, still spry but short of breath and with both whisky and cigarettes flatly ruled out I cannot say I’m enjoying it all that much wondering why in God’s name I ever signed up to write another novel but I did and even worse about a world of which I discover I know nothing, the law; but I’ve taken their money and am now waist deep. [...]
love and warm wishes
Willie
To James Cappio
[Cappio had sent WG an analysis of his draft of the Judge Bone opinion. WG’s letter was accompanied by a four-and-a-half legal-page outline of the legal procedure for one aspect of FHO.]
Wainscott
5 January ’90
Dear Jim:
Do not panic!
Let me explain, first. In the early summer I got stuck in the novel in the novel sense not the legal, it was just beginning to sound wooden, and I broke it off to write a subsequent sequence which I greatly enjoyed, Oscar being deposed by the defendants’ counsel Mister Mudpye, a token minority number in a large wasp blueribbon firm, enjoyed it so much that it runs 50 pages. More than ‘based on’, ‘drawn from’ &c&c, it is much of it line for line lifted from Saul Steinberg’s deposition in his suit v. Columbia Pictures, and another legal horror (assuming Saul’s acquiescence) how Mister Mudpye’s “real life” original (with Pryor Cashman Sherman & Flynn) will feel at being so parodied or are depositions fair game—
Meanwhile I read and reread your meticulous informed & delightful dissection of the Crease appeal decision, it’s misues of Murry v. NBC &c, and a) grasped or at least for the first time got a sense of the bramble patch I have marched so blithely into, and
b) realized I must throw out the grand design I had hatched in my early enthusiam (roughly, to compress AmJur (or at least Prosser) into a ‘novel’), whereupon
c) I went into a blue funk, from which my struggles to emerge have now got me as far as the brown study down the hall, whence this.
I thoroughly appreciate your repeated assurance (in Crease supra) that you mean only to clarify ‘real world’ law not direct my course, but that I might wish to know the former & where I’d strayed intentionally or otherwise (artistic license? sheer sloppiness? plain ignorance?), the point my main mentor has stressed from the start (Donald Oresman at Paramount, Simon-Schuster &c: “Did getting Arrows
mith medically correct make it a better novel?”) But I have got this damned affliction as witness J R for (what Bill Gass despises as) ‘verisimilitude’ or its semblance wherein events in the ‘real’ world of business (read, the law) while not plausible are essentially possible, ie an 11yr.old ‘could’ buy up by mail the controlling majority of a defaulted bond issue at 7¢ on the dollar, &c.
Thus re the attached assuming for the moment that you are not ready to call the whole thing quits here is my hopeful notion: It is as you will see at a glance my attempt at a simple ‘procedural’ outline for Oscar’s infringement case. I certainly do not ask or want you to deliver a 10 page written commentary but would this be feasible? to call you when ‘convenient’ and run through the steps for any major gaffes? as (in 6), would law firm A be obligated (by law? ethics?) to tell firm B it has discovered fraudulence in the credibility of a member of B’s staff? (though God knows I’m a long way from that scene) . . . And so forth.
I will call to try to explain further and will understand if your secretary responds ‘Mister Cappio is not taking any calls . . .’
warm regards & “happy new year”
Gaddis
Arrowsmith: Sinclair Lewis’s satiric 1925 novel about the medical profession.
To Donald Oresman
Wainscott NY 11975
21 January 1990
Dear Donald,
many thanks for Judge Leval (in fact I went to that lecture) and Ron Hubbard and the excuse to break this long silence.
Somewhere about the early summer I was abruptly overwhelmed by the enormity of the project I had set myself, its threat to come apart at the evident seams, and the legal complexities for which I was unprepared [...]. In this case it was a reading of my appeals court (Judge Bone’s opinion which you saw) decision for infringement for my protagonist Oscar by a meticulous young law clerk (for Judge Motley) since recruited by Cahill Gordon &c (who has admired my work to the extent of once inserting a citation from J R into Judge Breiant(sp?)’s opinion washing out Russian Imperials). His admonition has been similar to yours, ie: I will try to give you the relevant ‘real world’ points of law but please do not let this impede your fiction.
Nonetheless it all sent me ‘back to the drawing board’ as they aptly phrase it and I think very much to the novel’s eventual good; and I am heartened by the memory that this has happened before with both my earlier long novels—the teeming research, the putting it aside with ‘what have I got myself into!’—and the thing finally emerging in its own shape.
At any rate, toward the end of the year I sent along the draft bundle to the point it had reached to my S&S editor Allen Peacock as seemed only fair at this point, and had lunch with him just last week and found him quite pleased with it despite some obvious repetitions and disjointed elements (after all it is a draft) and I have always shrunk from showing unfinished work; but bearing all that in mind if you have any interest in looking at it at this stage of course you are welcome though I have hated to waste your time with unresolved ends or requests I am not ready to make immediate use of.
These eventually include Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States; Zorach v. Clauson; McGowan v. Maryland; Disney v. Air Pirates. But obviously the most intriguing current eruption must be Buchwald v. Paramount* aspect (NYTimes 15 Jan ’90) B’s lawyer took it on contingency but the judge didn’t require punitive damages (or ‘reasonable attorneys’ fees’?) and the legal costs already exceed B’s winnings, which is just where I have foreseen my protagonist Oscar heading.
On the side here I am probably heading myself for an expensive education with filmdom: one currently quiescent item with an option on Carpenter’s Gothic with Keith Barish which he wants to turn over to a Larry Gagosian if I will modify our agreement in which they now indemnify me to read instead that I indemnify them and everyone else in sight (so I’ve said if they want to go on with this nonsense they must pay my lawyer’s consultations: silence); and the other embracing efforts by a young screen writer to option J R for a possible deal with the gang at Guber Peters which seems ridden with pitfalls. Rather than arming one’s self to sue, what seems to me paramount (excuse!) these days is to arm one’s self against being sued. I have certainly got some tigers by the tails.
Well, thank you for reading this far. I had hoped to have something more conclusive before reaching you again, and now with Muriel in town I am staying on here in the grey sky country empty house for a bit with no preoccupations but those skirted above.
very warmest regards and wishes for the new year
Bill Gaddis
*which seems to me very much to resemble Murray v. NBC, black star and all.
Ron Hubbard: founder of Scientology (1911–86); many lawsuits pursued him during his lifetime and his organization after his death.
Cahill Gordon &c: Cahill Gordon & Reindel, a prominent Wall Street law firm established in 1919.
Allen Peacock: (1954– ); he acquired the novel in 1987 for $275,000 (half a million in today’s terms) but left Simon & Schuster in November 1990. The following March, Peacock went to work for Henry Holt, where he would later acquire AA.
Buchwald v. Paramount: journalist Art Buchwald successfully sued Paramount Pictures in 1990 for breach of contract over the 1988 movie Coming to America.
Keith Barish: American film producer (Endless Love, Sophie’s Choice, Ironweed, et al.).
Larry Gagosian: high-profile American art dealer.
Guber Peters: American film production company (The Color Purple, The Witches of Eastwick, Caddyshack II, et al.).
To Saul Steinberg
[Romanian-born cartoonist and illustrator (1914–99), best known for his work for the New Yorker. He was an old friend of Muriel Murphy, who introduced him to WG in 1982. As WG noted earlier (6 August 1987), Steinberg’s famous View of the World from 9th Avenue cover for the New Yorker (1976) inspired the poster for the movie Moscow on the Hudson (1984), which led to a lawsuit for copyright infringement against Columbia Pictures, mentioned in the letter below. (The lawyers for Columbia claimed protection under parody, but the court found in favor of Steinberg.) The case is cited in FHO (31) and a deposition from the case was the model for the one between Oscar, Basie, and Pai (185–234), referred to below as “the Deposition.”]
Wainscott, NY
21 January 1990
Dear Saul.
Rather than wait any longer on the formerly reliable chance of our all getting together for dinner with the vagaries of town or country, the weather &c where the promptings of conversation may serve to clarify one’s thoughts, I am trying to clarify some of mine by getting them down on paper here in some kind of order.
I have long been intrigued, and more recently troubled by, the collisions in human affairs caused by misunderstanding and ‘getting it wrong’ (this is in fact largely what Carpenter’s Gothic and especially the character Paul are all about); and I say ‘troubled by’ because in this past year it seems to have come home to roost on all sides: with Muriel, my son, and I’m sure elsewhere I don’t yet know about. Thus ‘the Deposition’.
Earlier in the summer my work on this law novel was not prospering, as I began to be aware of the complex mess I’d got myself into and the overwhelming source material I had assembled, including of course yours with Columbia where the Huff-Rembar deposition I thought offered a marvelous vehicle for parody of the vagaries of the legal process itself rather than the real people involved excepting insofar as it was heightened by your as always elegantly precise care for words and meanings harassed by the language at its most obfuscating in the mouths of otherwise intelligent lawyers, all this to the point where I felt in some odd way duty bound to pursue the parody as close as I could consistent with my protagonist’s (Oscar’s) dilemma.
Aside from the curious parallel of Columbia’s brief attempt to (misuse) parody as a defense, there emerged (in this ‘getting it wrong’ mode) the essential irony—irony being still to my old fashioned eye at the heart of fiction, certainly
comic fiction—which this letter is at such obvious pains to deal with, where in the light of our many past conversations and my impression from them of pretty complete license with the legal pages, motions, interrogations, memoranda, depositions &c that all this was a prank which we, you and I, were playing on not any person but on the process; and it was in that spirit that I devoted most of July and August, and that I pressed the results on you a couple of months ago.
Thus I was concerned when I got the thing back from you with accompanying cordial items but without comment, and remain so, more so in fact since I have gathered that my concern was justified. All this I failed to recognize at the time since by the early fall some sort of gap seemed already to have opened which Muriel and I remarked, she of course more sensitively and more informed by your long association than I, but we worried for it and simply hoped, that from wherever the chill descended—whether your own private affairs where we hesitated to intrude, or evidences of our own abrasions spreading discomfort around us—it would all fade in a natural recovery of our old bonhomie. I suspect the latter (our own abrasions), for which I must assume the main responsibility I suppose, and am acutely aware as you must be of your immense importance in Muriel’s life at its every level.
For myself, if I may be allowed to put it this way, our friendship over this past decade has been one of the most surprising gifts Muriel has brought to me, making this apparent rupture doubly difficult since, again, I trust you know my awareness of my strong sense of indebtedness to you in at best an uneven exchange and at, again, so many levels, from such worldy arenas as the Academy to sheer relish in conversation embracing even some painful glimpses of self revelation, and moments of enlightenment, of which this may be one.
with all possible warm regards,
Gaddis
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