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To Marc Chénetier
[A French literary critic (1946– ) who taught and wrote about WG’s work throughout his long, distinguished career. The following undated note is handwritten at the top of a photocopy of WG’s “Trickle-Up Economics: J R Goes to Washington” and was accompanied by the uncut version (RSP 62–71), which was translated by Chénetier’s student Brigitte Félix as “J R se met à la page” and published in Europe 733 (May 1990): 112–19.]
[April 1990]
Dear Marc Chenetier—
I am sorry to be so late responding to your letter of 14/03 but some recent confusion moving about and the question whether I might dig up something to send you for your edition of Europe—afraid this would not suit even if there were still time (though you’re welcome to use it) but thought that it might amuse you in any event,
best regards
William Gaddis
To Joseph Tabbi
[Tabbi sent WG his essay ‘The Compositional Self in William Gaddis’ JR,” Modern Fiction Studies 35.4 (Winter 1989–90): 655–71.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
1 May 1990
Dear Joseph Tabbi.
Thank you for sending me your Compositional Self piece from Modern Fiction Studies. It certainly reflects a wide and careful reading & I find the analyses & conclusions very much to the point & obviously pleasing to me.
My one moment of annoyance came with your very mild reprimand on p659 “It was, I think, erroneous and perhaps unfair of John Gardner to conclude in the New York Review of Books, simply from one character’s conceit of the unfinished work as a kind of invalid, that Gaddis himself ‘was apparently uneasy about bringing out J R.’” The whole point of that image was of course precisely the opposite, like most of Gardner’s points in that appallingly perverse misreading of the book right through to the end where he concludes how easy it is to portray the artist as ground down by commerce when, again, the point is precisely the opposite in Gibbs, Eigen & Bast constantly putting obstacles in their own paths to avoid facing the completion & consequences of the creative act head on, as crystalized in Bast’s resolution at the very end to do so. The whole ‘review’ was a transparent stunt he has pulled elsewhere (see his on was it Walker Percy’s? Lancelot), the flattering & utterly phony appreciative buildup packed with strawmen to be demolished in the conclusion (‘it fails as art’), a regular Procrustian bed tended by a man I have always been convinced simply eaten out by envy & I have never quite understood how he was allowed to run around loose for so long patronizing his betters, the epitome of course being his ridiculous number on ‘moral fiction’ (what was J R if not exactly that?). Now I grant it would be awfully difficult to be so vain a fellow publishing a novel the year the Pulitzer Prize—about his level if he’d ever got a prize (see Bill Gass on the Pulitzer in the NYTimes BR a few years ago)—the year that is that they fail to give one in fiction because they find no worthy candidate, even worse I should imagine than seeing it go to some other pedestrian contender since there is very much the heart of the cancer: his writing was simply pedestrian, which he tried to make up for / divert attention from by providing bizarre (to his lights) characters like his ‘magician’ in October Light & some book about a giant boy locked up in a closet. Interestingly enough he was a great admirer of The Recognitions early on which finally soured, & perhaps it was the theme of forgery that spoke to him, later to blossom in borrowings & plagiaries, a little Sir Arthur Eddington here, some murky business about the Canterbury Tales there, so to find the poor bastard ‘perhaps’ erroneous & unfair is gentle handling indeed.
Addendum: poor George Steiner too (speaking of paranoia), in his own embarrassing attempt at fiction, some nonsense about carting Adolf Hitler out of the woods in Argentina was it? Brought to mind the Arab into Spanish proverb into English: Sit in the doorway of your house & watch the bodies of your enemies carried by . . . a long sitting but amply rewarded. (He apparently never noticed the inconsistency in calling a book unreadable & then reviewing it presumably having read it—though there was evidence otherwise.)
I doubt you expected such an outburst in return for your kind gesture in sending me your piece singling out one fleetingly brief passage from the thoughtful & estimable whole but quite obviously it’s been rankling for a long time. Otherwise I thank you for calling my attention to Melville’s Pierre which I read ages ago if then & will look it up now.
with regards,
William Gaddis
Your Faulkner epigraph is marvelous.
Walker Percy’s? Lancelot: Gardner reviewed this novel in the 20 February 1977 issue of the New York Times Book Review; like his review of J R, it is reprinted in Gardner’s On Writers and Writing (Addison-Wesley, 1994).
Bill Gass on the Pulitzer: “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize,” reprinted in Gass’s Finding a Form (Knopf, 1996), 3–13 (which mentions WG on pp. 8 and 12). No Pulitzer Prize in fiction was given in 1971, the year Gardner published Grendel.
‘magician’: the magician is actually in Gardner’s Sunlight Dialogues, not October Light (1976). The giant boy is in Freddy’s Book (1980).
Sir Arthur Eddington: (1882–1944) English astronomer, cited by WG in FHO.
Steiner [...] fiction: The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (1981).
Faulkner epigraph: “It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save for the printed books.”
To Susan Barile
[A young woman who, as the letter notes, abandoned law school to become a writer. To support herself she worked at various New York City bookstores, including Gotham Book Mart; see head-note to letter of 13 November 1991.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
2 May 1990
Dear Susan Barile.
Thank you for your letter & for your generous appraisal of my work; but there are so many pitfalls in a writer’s life that having inadvertently encouraged you to pursue it inevitably makes me somewhat uneasy & I can only wish you luck.
I suppose this strikes me especially right now because just as you abandon law school I have become entangled with another novel involving lawsuits of every variety—the one at the center embracing copyright infringement—through having been seduced by reading opinions which I find real gems in the use of the language proceeding on to the fine points of the law which seems to be nothing but fine points & find it a little late to be starting my legal education.
Good luck to us both,
Yours
William Gaddis
To Saul Steinberg
Wainscott
2 July 1990
Dear Saul.
Well, I have greatly missed seeing you, both for the pleasure & illuminations of the old comraderie fallen under the shadow of ‘unfinished business’ in these troubled times. It was a bleak winter out here adrift on a sea of doubts & the work not going well—barely going at all in fact—so much so that even with the entire spring passed taking the Academy with it only now the pall is lifting & that not by grace but force of will if it can be sustained. Clearly a part of all this has been that fragment of work on which I spent last summer and which, to my total & unhappy surprise, took painful shape as another in the series ‘the high brutality of good intentions’ from which I still earnestly hope we can be rescued, much less any ‘harm’ intended or so far as I can see even faintly implied as I am sure a reading of the entire 300-odd page MS to date would bear out if you are inclined to consider such a chore. At the least I should very much like for us to sit down together when it suits you, if it suits you, & hope to hear from you about such a possibility.
yours most sincerely,
Gaddis
To Howard Goldberg
[Editor of the New York Times’s Op-Ed page. This cover letter accompanied WG’s essay “This Above All,” on the Silverado Savings & Loan scandal of 1990, which was rejected; published posthumously in RSP (110–13).]
Wainscott, New York 11975
30
July 1990
Dear Howard Goldberg.
I think Mike Levitas warned you that this would appear on your desk.
You will see that something in me seems hellbent on getting US ex rel. Gerald Mayo in there but this time I think the flow from his in forma pauperis to the homeless to Reagan’s get-rich credo (to Keynes’ everybody getting rich/for foul is useful to S&L to &c &c) follows closely and earnestly hope you agree. So closely in fact right through to the end that it would be very painful to cut further* (as I have already done from the earlier notes and drafts even given up Ed Meese in the process) in trying not to take full advantage of Mike Levitas’ generous provisos regarding length getting up in the 12–1500 area (QED) though when the figure rose higher he did qualify with ‘since you trust Howard Goldberg’s editing’ as I do but obviously desperately hope that (what I read as) the tight coherency of the piece will stay your hand . . .
Holding my breath, I am
with best regards,
Yours
W. Gaddis
*I would yield the opening sentence if so pressed.
Mike Levitas: Mitchell Levitas, another editor of the Op-Ed page and former editor of the Times Book Review.
Gerald Mayo: the Satan-blaming plaintiff mentioned on p. 430 of FHO.
in forma pauperis: legal Latin: “in the manner of a pauper”; i.e., at no cost.
Keynes: economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), as quoted in E. F. Schumaker’s Small Is Beautiful: Speculating in the 1930s that someday everyone would be rich, Lord Keynes cautioned, “The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not” (Harper & Row, 1973), 24.
Ed Meese: Attorney General under Ronald Reagan.
opening sentence: “We will find justice in the next world; in this world we have the law”—paraphrased as the opening sentence of FHO.
To Sarah Gaddis
[In response to reading the bound galley for her forthcoming novel, published the following January, in which WG is portrayed as Lad Thompkins, and his Harvard friend Douglas Wood (see 14 March 1957) as Douglas Kipps. Sarah was still living in France at the time.]
23 August 1990
dear Sarah.
Well! I have just finished a slow reading of Swallow Hard. It’s no longer a book by a girl about a girl growing up but a real book written by a young woman about a girl, yes, but people and places and feelings and things I never knew you knew—I don’t mean ‘facts of life’ or family secrets but life’s secrets & secret places some of them quite touching and some of them quite painful & done with a sense & use of language that so exquistely suits & conveys them with never a bit of self indulgence, so clean, certain of itself & underivative of others’ styles so full & entirely itself in its haunting sense of desolation utterly uncluttered by sentimentality especially in those very last lines which are so spare & simply stunning.
I remember reading those last lines in your MS & commenting on their effectiveness but is this the same book I read? or am I the same or not the same person who read it? This latter I find very disconcerting because I’m quite aware that this past year or so in my various states of being there have been gaps, gaps of memory & attention & concentration all over the place but still, this book is so much more full than I remembered, not simply of people but of insights & fraught impressions & deeper glimpses & the staunch (‘Firm and steadfast; true’ as the dictionary defines it) quality that Marvin Cherney grasped in his painting & is there still.
All the Fire Isld part of course I remember but not the extent to which you evoked that village & house & the people careening around from room to room (all I see missing is the Monopoly under that paper lampshade) but the atmosphere of it is all there so marvelously yet never overdone which is as true of the rest of the book’s familiar scenes & places, & how curious we will be to learn what it evokes for ‘the reader’ who was not there but here again, all that is evoked by sheer invention so far as I know, I mean there never was a Peninghen was there? So for me throughout there is the repeated shock of recognition buffeted by that of fabrication & all of it running smooth & seamless. And the people. Your Douglas must be the most remarkable creation in the book, for turning a ‘real’ person into a character elaborated in your invention of who he was and who—for those of us who knew him—he might have been, so well might have been if he had soared on the wings you’ve given him, an utterly believable character for ‘the reader’ & was equally real a poignant evocation of the fellow we knew. And the way you have juxtaposed him with her father Lad (I remember most vividly when I was in the mad & drinking & yes, I admit self pitying throes of that prolonged divorce, Douglas saying in the blunt way you have captured so well: Did you think it was going to be easy? meaning of course not the divorce but life: it pulled me up short, & still does when I recall it not infrequently because I think I did & in some demented way still do). Thus the brooding smoking cut off Lad/father you’ve given us: again, so understated & unsentimentalized & unindulgently but there at the end (page 311) right to the core.
Which I think, this juxtaposition of Douglas & Lad, gives your last line “. . . and almost drowned, and made a man a hero” such stunning effect because so suddenly & abruptly & believably it is all there; & I cannot imagine anyone reading it without feeling a blow to the pit of the stomach but at the same time an overwhelming & lingering sense of the inevitable beauty of it.
And thus all of this considered I think your original title that you’ve ended up with Swallow Hard is the right one, it’s sharp & intriguing when you pick the book up and continues to reverberate when you’ve finished reading it & put it down; & what else is to be said about it for now. Except what a pain to have to wait till February! But that, as we know, ‘comes with the territory’.
Except that you have a well earned Happy Birthday ahead! Because it will be one not of tinseled presents but one you have made yourself with all of your own courage & diligence & talent, & I know if anyone outside yourself can know the cost of all that to you, a pretentious thing to say but if not as aware perhaps at least aware of the part my own delinquencies & clumsy & so often futile attempts to keep the peace, have played. So you have every reason to be as proud of yourself as I am of you when you face the gang at Deauville & Lord knows some familiar faces, I have heard that Sidney & Pidie Lumet will be there, he is a warm fellow (despite my earlier annoyance with him for Matthew’s budding career speaking of my clumsy attempts) & Pidie is absolute tops, straight as can be. I forget who else but understand you may even get Gloria Jones, enough said, you can handle that.
The world prospects are something else now that they are spilling over into our own lives, USA was already becoming a financial nightmare but now with the millions a day Iraq adventure really alarming, my concern for your situation with the steady decline of the dollar if you are going to try to continue to carry that apartment yourself & my own situation when for the first time next January there will be no check from Simon & Schuster since the final one is due when I turn in the ‘finished’ MS which is (as always with my works) ‘not quite finished’, my Italian publisher silent on the $15 thousand he has owed me since spring & the movie prospects in the usual unresolved chaos but the Lord knows, looking back, we are certainly all much better off than we have been. There have been some rocky times here but I think we are straightening them out & Matthew is in very good form working away at his projects & the great good fortune of Katarina.
with my love as always, your proud
Papa
Marvin Cherney: American painter (1925–67), a family friend.
Peninghen: an artist’s colony located on a country estate in Swallow Hard.
Gloria Jones: see 9 June 1984.
Iraq adventure: President Bush began sending US troops to the Mideast shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990.
Katarina: Matthew’s girlfriend at the time.
22 September 1990
Dear Jim,
I wonder how many times I have not written you (though you are at the top of a long list), appalled at the time that has passed & I cannot explain but can possibly recount. First I believe was my abrupt halt after your fine long detailed dissection of the Bone opinion reversing Oscar’s loss of his case on appeal, originality vs novelty &c. (I daren’t even look it up now for the date.) It was that I believe that made me stop and realise the immense morass I’d got myself into, the reams of material, of hundreds of marked passages in AmJur & Prosser & I thought, like Mr Gibbs in his (my) Agapē Agape, what in God’s name did I think I was doing! [J R 586] To be clear here: I was very aware of your sensitive & generous concern that I not feel you were correcting/ interfering with the work but were simply trying, as I wished you would do, to make me aware of any legal gaps in case I wished to amend them. And all along about that time other breakdowns came along, in threatened health, confidence, the ‘what use is any of it’ that apparently comes upon many enough writers late in their careers. Unproductive months, a bleak & grey winter spent out here alone largely, each day starting Now I shall get to it, ending Perhaps tomorrow, then.
Meanwhile to the work itself, my realisation that in my absorption with ‘the law’ & absurd notion of a novel almost entirely of legal memorandums briefs opinions &c my real attention & any surviving remnants of ‘talent’ should return to a novel’s real essentials: plot springing from character, character must be consistent but plot should cause surprise (Forster), what happens next? And in that desolate months-long search which should have taken a week gradually finding the clues in your Bone letter: Oscar’s (black) lawyer permits (or later says he did) the NYS law regarding originality (patents) to prevail intending to turn about & win on appeal (I haven’t got all that quite straight in my head yet, just how it will work), meanwhile it’s revelaed that he (the black lawyer Mr Basie) is a fraud, never passed the bar, learned law in prison &c, Oscar threatens his firm, finally his father the old Judge Crease reads the lower court’s decision & spots the flaws (which you spotted) steps in & directs the (successful) appeal (Bone recast) not out of love for Oscar whom he’s angry with for having exploited the family in his awful play but for love of the law; meanwhile having had his own troubles back with Cyclone 7 struck by lightning which killed the dog Spot (negligence? Act of G*d?) &c about where I’m at now, sometimes a week for a paragraph when things are going well . . .