More and more prompted by those lines in Four Quartets where the words slip slide perish will not stay in place, where it’s all been done before better & elsewhere such a stunning passage I can’t believe I don’t have it here at hand but you certainly know it.
I heard, again how long ago! that you were no longer with Cahill but that’s all, I hope this reaches you. And getting hold of myself again I will write, at latest when I have James B. (Infant) v. Village of Tatamount, Crease, J. in some sort of shape. [FHO 285–93] Perhaps starting tomorrow.
with thanks always for your time and patience,
I hope things are going well—W Gaddis
To Judith Gaddis
[1 October 1990]
Dear Judith,
no I don’t “think one ever can” get one’s life in order, at least in my experience of it so far (& most of those I see around me) though they strive: here’s Matthew living up near the GW [George Washington] bridge in a bloodthirsty neighborhood working at movie scripts, I keep telling him he’s too nice a person to get mixed up with that bunch (“I know, Pop”) and he is, compassionate’s the best word & with a kind of wisdom, just very decent though (or because of) these qualities don’t provide great financial returns; & Sarah still trying to get things in place has been living in Paris these 5 or 6 years after her escape-marriage collapsed (like going to live with the Shaws dinner-at-6) but speaking of Fire Isld she’s written a novel titled Swallow Hard which about sums it up, you & Matthew are not included but the ‘father’ appears in old tennis shoes, smoking, writing books that don’t sell too well, but touching & distant both, to be published in February & the early Saltaire days house full of drinking friends quite vivid as you’ll see. And the drinking I think looking back was a great part in “what went wrong”, I only realized recently what a large part it played in a good 40 years of my life, now haven’t had a scotch & soda &c for 1½ years though a little wine along the way, & the smoking & its effects still the on-again off-again plague. I can no more imagine that I’m approaching 70 than you as 50 & I find time goes more quickly & is harder to understand, part of it I know is approaching the end of a 4year book contract with of course the thing not at all near delivery, I suddenly got fascinated by the law for a novel in which everybody is finally suing everybody else & it took me a couple of years to realize the mess I’d got myself into, books & books & judicial opinions briefs depositions & marked passages piled high now trying to work my way out of it all so we don’t have another aborted Secret History of the Player Piano but the law is a very complicated & often comic scene or at least I hope to make it so.
Well, your word of Paz—that most unacceptable event we are obliged to accept, Barney Emmart gone, Bernie Winebaum—but beyond her ‘eccentricities’ the moment I think of Paz is with a lift of spirits & thank heavens for such an abrupt & simple end how touched I am at her last thought for me. Lord we all did try, how we tried! & you I believe most of all till it simply became untenable & it took me a long time to understand that & to grasp your courage. And of course I think of you not infrequently & all our good days & always with the hope you are well because you so deserve well & even the ‘contentment’ you sought from the start & I could not grasp, your letter was generous & so like I always remember you & I will let you know as things prosper or at least go on,
W.
Paz: see 16 July 1974.
James Cappio
[Enclosed was a draft of the second Crease opinion, mentioned in WG’s last letter to Cappio. In a postscript he adds: “The New Yorker declined, having had enough of Spot—”]
3 Nov. 90
Dear Jim,
many thanks for your letters & new treatise. I have read that some 40 thousand enter law school each year, about the same number leaving the profession over stress, distress, &c&c & so much I suppose for your departure from Cahill but it is a shock that you haven’t landed elsewhere, or is there a (divinity?) that shapes our ends rough hew them how we may? For now I just hope that you’ll stay around town a bit longer to keep an eye on me.
So to keep the lines of communication back in operation I attach the attached for your entertainment. Having drafted it I’ve now taken a step back to lay the ground for it in the novel’s terms, just a few but tortured pages then on to the Main Action again.
Looking at the attached I red underlined a couple of phrases unsure if they are correct usage, otherwise the same madness prevails (having got into ‘bailment’ when a tenant here reneged & left possessions I was ready to sell or destroy but was warned we were inadvertant bailees, thus we learn).
But I will be back in touch after the above low hurdle.
best regards,
W.G.
a (divinity?) that shapes our ends: Hamlet 5.2.10.
To Sarah Gaddis
14 March ’91
Dear Sarah.
This morning I decided to approach it all differently: daily I’ve got up, tea & come straight to the typewriter to take up where I left off yesterday’s frustration, thinking Work Must Come First, then letters &—but what this has led to over what’s now weeks is neither letters nor the work; I have never that I recall been so stuck, a day or 2 on 3 or 4 lines & even those unsatisfactory. So now at 8 am I’ve reversed things, at least will get one letter off to you before the day collapses. [...]
Well not being practical folk sitting down to apply our talents to sex greed & violence best seller success in the American Way, we have chosen an odd path for ourselves, me complaining at this end over these frustrations entirely of my own making & you there having done an honest piece of work in the so far as I know silent aftermath. Individually you get very good grades: Helen (Mrs E.L.) Doctorow with many words of praise for your book (she having written a novel), Karen Saks, all impressed by your work & want to see you Move Onward. Louis Auchinloss the most teacherly: Well Will, I have just finished reading your daughter’s book, she is most certainly a writer & now that she has exorcised you, having killed you off at the end, I hope she will go on to the wider world. And so, now given your proven talent & ability, that does seem to be the next challenge, getting away from, out of one’s self to create entire fictions & characters (although these inevitably are made up of bits & pieces of one’s self & one’s own observations), but necessarily plot & story, where as Forster says, plot arising from character, that character must be consistent but plot should cause surprise. It has always seemed to me, though I have never really managed it, what a treat to get hold of an essentially simple situation & then watch the story write itself. For instance the one of Gaslight, the man marries the wealthy woman & then sets about driving her crazy, convincing her fearing & convincing herself that she is going mad & he is trying desperately to help, the only one she can trust & turn to &c. Well maybe all this is going too far but you see what I mean. A Plot. Something Matthew and I have talked about regarding his own work & medium, the movies, where it is more especially important I think, not just for suspense but that suspense must always be present (not necessarily the murder mysery sort) but simply What will happen next? To create characters the reader will, first, believe, & second, care about what happens to. Why so many movies are so ridiculously bad, the character scarcely believable but even if so you really don’t give a damn what happens to him as in most of these violence prone shoot out movies, who cares?
Also this business of character & plot as of particular importance at the stage you are at now if you wish to be: having proved that you can write, publish, & get Sunday NYTimes reviewed, to work out & outline a ‘story’ & write a chapter or 2 for an advance on another novel. Not a reflection on your work but simply the times we live in that whereas a few years ago there were almost immediate paperback offers when a novel came out, now (according to my editor at Simon & Sch) far far fewer. (Any day now both J R & The Recogntions OP, out of print.) Well it’s the world we’ve chosen & not an easy row to hoe as yr grandmother would have said. [...]
I just learned that Mark Twain too
k 3 years off between halves of finishing Huckleberry Finn, some comfort.
much love
Papa
Helen [...] a novel: as Helen Henslee, Mrs. Doctorow published a novel entitled Pretty Redwing (1982).
Karen Saks: correctly Keren: second wife of stage and film director Gene Saks (1921– ).
Forster [...] cause surprise: “characters, to be real, ought to run smoothly, but a plot ought to cause surprise”—Aspects of the Novel (Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 137—a phrase cited by Judge Bone in FHO (411).
Gaslight: the 1944 film directed by George Cukor, as well as the 1940 screen adaptation directed by Thorold Dickinson, both share this plot, which originated in the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton.
To Griselda Ohannessian
[Managing Director of New Directions (1927– ). After Stuart Klawans’s “Out of Print, but Not Forgotten” appeared in the Voice Literary Supplement in April 1991—expressing outrage at the “out of stock indefinitely” status of WG’s first two novels—WG received several inquiries from publishers. (WG wrote Klawans a thank-you note on 7 May 1991.) This letter acknowledges the importance of New Directions’s avant-garde titles to writers of WG’s generation .]
Wainscott, New York 11975
7 May 1991
Dear Ms Ohannessian.
Thank you for your inquiry regarding reprint possibilities for my 2 novels discussed in the VLS article, which has provoked a good deal of interest. I have put the whole matter in the hands of my agent Candida Donadio & eventually we will work out some resolution; meanwhile looking back to my reading in the late ’forties I recall among the best, such things as The Wanderer, Kafka’s Amerika &c, under the New Directions imprint & whether or not we may work out anything in this current instance find your interest gratifying.
Yours,
William Gaddis
The Wanderer [...] Amerika: Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes) was published by New Directions in Françoise Delisle’s translation in 1946, and Kafka’s unfinished novel in 1940.
To John Napper
Wainscott, New York 11975
Hallowe’en 1991
Well! dear John,
what a treat & a pleasure & a confirmation your news brings that you’re both still with us but, with the Albemarle catalogue, triumphantly so! as the pictures themselves express in just these terms; their (your) clarity & vitality but (as I read them) underneath lurking something awfully wrong.
My own plods on at the usual glacial pace (426pp to date) but with What’s Dreadfully Wrong out there for all to see. I got far far deeper into ‘the law’ than intended, enough research for 10 books as usual & now struggling to surface once I at last realized that perhaps The Reader is not so utterly entranced by the mad elegance of a well written court Opinion as I, to say nothing of the intricacies of the (this is all) civil law itself; I mean I’d rather read Prosser on Torts than most novels (except of course the 19sie Russians . . .
Imagine: I was actually in England for a couple of days in the spring. By misadventure. I hadn’t seen Sarah for some long time so heard about a $199. round trip to Paris, by ‘stand by’ & indeed I did: getting there was easy, spent 4 fine days, then 2 days ‘standing by’ at deGaulle; finally got on a plane to Boston but ‘we stop in London’ & indeed we did, all put off the plane at Heathrow, in to a minute bed&breakfast nr Victoria, another day standing by at Heathrow, another bed&breakfast night nr Victoria & quite unable to see anyone so of course ended up spending the simple return trip fare on these shenanigans & really got back to my own bed vowing never to travel again, preferring “a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad, and to travel for it too.”
Now, regarding the enclosure, if you are prepared to be amused? appalled? My ‘portrait’ done on a large expanse of broken crockery by Julian Schnabel: could anything be more remote from your Recognition (#11)? Well. He wanted to do it, having dipped into The Recognitions & simply gave it to me, a large forthright generous fellow I got quite fond of but his other & much heralded (others say ‘hyped’) ‘abstracts’ are utterly beyond me as is all of what’s going on in the galleries these days. To say nothing of ‘poetry’.
So we’ve no choice but to persist & know that we will last. Your spry photo in the elegant Albemarle is most heartening. I haven’t had a glass of spirits for more than 2 years though a little wine for the stomach’s sake, still fight the tobacco back & forth & its toll is apparent (especially dragging a bag through the endless corridors of Heathrow). Congratulations!
and love to you both,
Willie
Albemarle catalogue: published to coincide with Napper’s exhibit at the Albemarle Gallery in London, 16 October–22 November 1991.
“a fool [...] travel for it too”: so says Rosalind in As You Like It, 4.1.25–26.
a little wine for the stomach’s sake: “for thy stomach’s sake,” 1 Timothy 5:23 (quoted in R, 24).
To Erika Goldman
[An editor at Scribner’s who requested a blurb for John Aldridge’s Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction (1982), on American fiction of the 1980s, including WG’s.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
7 November 1991
Dear Erika Goldman.
Thank you for sening me John Aldridge’s Talents and Technicians.
I don’t write (or seek) jacket blurbs but in this case think you & certainly John Aldridge would agree in the light of his long generous appraisal of my work, renewed in these pages, it could appear especially self serving & in fact prove counterproductive.
Well, that said, I read it straight through with pleasure & bleats of satisfaction, a very much needed corrective succinctly putting forth what many feel but haven’t had his patience in actually examing the material & bearing down with critical intelligence, right from the earliest pages’ vital distinction between critics & reviewers & the latters’ encroachment upon or rather displacement of the former in our current ‘literary’ climate which seems to have gone unremarked for the major deleterious factor it has willy nilly become.
My own patience with the material under fire here was provoked by curiosity & exhausted quite early with a try at Raymond Carver’s ‘story’ about the birthday cake, manipulated sentimentality &c & I looked in vain in these pages’ exploration of the self fulfilling/defeating plague of Teaching Creative Writing—my own brief & depressing foray among undergraduates to witness—for the debt Carver apparently felt to a major minimalist in terms of talent John Gardner whose numbing infuence seems to persist beyond the grave.
Taken altogether, Aldridge’s thesis recalls to me lines of a poet (Roy Campbell?) of generations ago as ‘They use the bridle and the curb all right, but where’s the bloody horse?’
Good luck with publishing the book & please give John Aldridge my best personal regards when you are in touch with him,
yours,
William Gaddis
Carver’s ‘story’: “A Small, Good Thing” (in Cathedral [1983]), regarded as one of his finest efforts.
Roy Campbell: Anglo-African poet (1901–57). His poem ‘On Some South African Novelists” (1930) begins: ‘You praise the firm restraint with which they write—/ I’m with you there, of course: / They use the snaffle and the curb all right, / But where’s the bloody horse?”
To Susan Barile
[Barile planned to open a bookstore called “Noted with High Regard Though Seldom Read” (after the last line of R), and wanted WG to read at the store’s opening, but the store never came to be. She was working at Gotham Book Mart at this time, whose rare-book department was curated by Andreas Brown, mentioned below.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
13 November 1991
Dear Ms. Barile.
I apologize for being so late about answering your inquiry & generous estimate of my work.
To the ‘readings’: I avoid giving them (& sitting through them) but appreciate your invitation. The one at the luncheon out
here in the spring was a local library benefit & a favour to a friend, & as far as that goes I didn’t read from my but Dostoevski’s work, a long comic scene of a literary luncheon fete in The Possessed. I do recall talking with your friend there & sorry to hear about your illness deferred bookstore project but certainly the Gotham should fill the bill as it always has done & of course it’s pleasing to hear of the inquiries for my books & your efforts on their behalf.
The Village Voice piece came as a happy surprise to me & did in fact elicit inquiries from ½ dozen publishers, still fiddling with Viking/Penguin over whether they’ll renew their imminently expiring license or sign off, given the chaotic state of publishing Lord knows the outcome but I hope to in a week or so.
Please too give my best regards to Andreas Brown who gave me generous advice some years ago on the equally mad area of my ‘archives’ on which I’ve still taken no action except to relentlessly add to it as this present work trundles on at my usual overburdened glacial pace.
with kind regards
William Gaddis
To Ann Patty
[Publisher (1953– ) and Editorial Director of Poseidon Press, which she founded in 1982. After Allen Peacock left Simon & Schuster, FHO was passed along to her. Poseidon went under in 1993; FHO, published on 17 January 1994, was one of its last titles.]
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