B007RT1UH4 EBOK

by Gaddis, William

  Wainscott, NY

  4 January 1993

  Dear Saul,

  it is not a paper shortage here that prompts this (overleaf) as my letter paper but it occurred to me you might be amused by these desperate notes for the morass I’m engulfed in out here trying perhaps unsuccessfully & surely unnecessarily to join up fragments of Longfellow’s Hiawatha with the tenants of a home aquarium in this last ditch effort to roll up this whole ball of wax (speaking of mixed metaphors) which keeps me from coming into town this week for not merely the pleasure but the happy need of your company at one of our simple dinners together which have meant a great deal to me as perhaps never more than now with the opportunity to thank you for your overpowering gift & so much else.

  Muriel returns on Saturday from her London trip with her companion & I have the rather desperate but not entirely impossible hope of finishing the near final draft of this project which has oppressed our house like a contagious illness for so long ridden of course with the deep fear of its being too late to save the situation or any human part of it if I could ever have done so which you were subjected to in its latest & most painful manifestation at the Century: all I may have learned from it is that my daughter’s torments here on these occasions have blinded me to her own very perilous condition anywhere & that that must be my first assignment, especially given what have increasingly seemed to become my futile and too often intemperate efforts to resolve or at least to deal effectively with the domestic situation which now embraces this 3rd party ‘analyst’ to in my view a quite bizarre degree. Of course I may have got the whole thing backwards if indeed the topsy-turvy world we see on the evening news is the real one.*

  Well enough for now of this burden on your generosity friendship which you have shown us both in so many ways over what have become so many years, I look forward to seeing you in a short time and in a better climate for my wishes to you for a ‘happy new year’,

  with every high regard,

  Gaddis

  PS I have reread & still think Updike might have framed exactly the points he claims undraped by the ‘melancholy’ he himself inhabits.

  *And so I go back where I came from, to reading Eliot,

  To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual

  Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:

  And always will be, some of them especially

  When there is distress of nations and perplexity

  Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road

  (1943)

  the Century: the Century Club in Manhattan.

  Updike: reference unknown.

  To explore the womb [...] in the Edgware Road: from part 5 of Eliot’s “Dry Salvages.”

  To Donald Oresman

  Wainscott, New York 11975

  18 Jan. ’93

  Dear Donald,

  first to thank you for ‘this year’s sheaf’ of literary pointers from which I happily gather you are well & fully operational; next to report that I turned in the last of the full (629pp) MS of this sometime law novel last week to the attention of Ann Patty at Poseidon whither I was diverted when the young Alan Peacock left the S&S fold. What she will make of it I do not know.

  I recall, as I have continually throughout the process, your prompting that what was at stake here was a novel & not an agonizedly accurate legal treatise (Was Arrowsmith any the better for Lewis’s having checked every blister & catheter with the doctors? you asked) & so it has come about with The Last Act (a rather weak title I think & expect to change).

  And so, as is hardly unusual, during the daily desperate course of it over the past 2 or 3 years, it changed of its own accord in that direction away from the series of legal briefs & opinions I had originally & haplessly envisioned, although the characters are from first to last entangled in legal thickets from the sublime to the ridiculous & the ‘story’ just as I planned it right through the last despairing outcry. (Was there a retort ascribed to Joyce when asked regarding Ulysses, What’s it about? ‘It’s not about something, it is something’?)

  At any rate I am getting my breath for the patchwork yet to be done amidst bright spots on the publishing horizon: both The Recognitions & J R appearing in the Penguin XXth Century Classic series around May, & a trip before that to Paris for the publication of J R in the French language which I can scarcely imagine.

  And so perilous as it may be I am finally able to try in some way to thank you for your concern & repeated patient & willing efforts at encouragement right from your first mailing of Palsgraf v LIRR through the now dogeared casebook on torts—still left now with the drained feeling of not having got in the prolonged brief on Episcopal Church of America v Pepsico (aka ‘Pepiscola’) though the case is there fleetingly, as with others, recalling Tolstoy’s dismayed outcry waking the day War & Peace went to press with My God! I left out the yacht race!

  with very best regards and hopes of seeing you soon

  Bill

  To Ann Patty

  [Selections from the first two acts of WG’s old play Once at Antietam appear in FHO; he enclosed the third and final act.]

  235 East 73rd str.

  New York 10021

  24 February ”93

  dear Ann Patty,

  here (literally) is the last act. You will see, it is quite heavyhanded, inflated &c rising to heights almost, in fact, as bad as O’Neill. But it is perhaps what Oscar as we now know him from the book might have written (even to Oedipus’ blinding at the end). (There are references to items cut from the passages quoted in the book such as his daughter, the watch & tobacco case which may confuse.) However I am terribly pleased at your comment that you love reading the play whenever you come to it in the book & relieved that you don’t find it obtrusive since it should function, like the Opinions, as documentation; & like them, set in a different type, skimable or skipable for the LemonHaupts in the audience. I had omitted it both for the length & with some esoteric notion of ‘the melancholia of things completed’ as well as for its highblown pretensions but am curious what your impression will be.

  From a quick review of your comments they all seem to me very well taken, helpful useful &c—with perhaps an exception or two when I come to them—very much to the point. Especially the Basie/Mudpye repetition of the O’Neill references which had in fact just struck me after finishing the thing looking back & thinking how did I let this happen? So I’d already faced the chore of somehow rectifying it. (I agree on somehow tying up the O’Neill estate suit at the end.)

  I see your point regarding the length of the Deposition, had also already thought of trimming for instance Mudpye’s police/criminal symbiosis allegory; but every time I’ve been through the whole thing I’ve found it about the fastest reading in the book perhaps for its profound absurdity as legal procedures go (most depositions of this nature running 1 or 2 or more hundred pages); & again, in a different typeface, lightning skimable but to the heart of the pivotal issue for the ‘serious reader’ & the horde of disillusioned lawyers out there.

  What do you think of this title for the book: Once at Antietam?

  I am here drudging away & at your call on shortest notice, as yet unclear how long my patchwork will take & want your rough schedule whenever you have it.

  Needless to say your concluding ‘brilliant, amazing, important novel’ is most heartening.

  Yours,

  W. Gaddis

  ‘the melancholia of things completed’: a line from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that WG first used in R (69, 599) and again in J R (486).

  To Muriel Oxenberg Murphy

  [One of several letters and faxes WG sent to Mrs. Murphy over the next few years as their relationship deteriorated. Two of hers to him are reprinted in her Excerpts, pp. 202–4.]

  Sunday evening [February/March 1993?]

  Dear Muriel,

  Maybe a way of putting it is that I think you have ‘star quality’ and I am trying to understand what I mean by that, but I t
hink I have always thought that, the first time we met and when we met again and every day since but having got it into those two words I see what a marvelously complex idea it is and a difficult one—that I had simply accepted it when we came together counting my blessings every day and night and it is true you never leave my thoughts happy or proud troubled or fearful whatever they are or all of these at once and so as I say so difficult to try to face and figure out and satisfy except at last how terribly and sadly apparently true how I have not succeeded and, apparently again, till this last year or so taken for granted that I had—you must imagine it was quite painful to hear you write off the times we’ve had together here there and places in the world I’ve taken you as a mere decade alcoholic haze with “I’ve had better times” but what a dreadful thing it would be to lose it now. Well it’s surely enough raining out there and I am trying to get my work done and to figure out ‘star quality’* here for starters, perhaps you can?

  With much love, at least I hope you know that,

  W.

  *not to be confused with ‘star complex’, ‘star struck’ &c—

  To Muriel Oxenberg Murphy

  [A fax: the first half refers to two essays published in the February 1993 issue of Dædalus—which WG received as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters—and the second half details the sights he and Mrs. Murphy saw during their travels the previous decade.]

  3 March 93

  The almost forgotten blessing of sleeping in a real bed again. . . . how subtly one’s horizons shrink, lower, close in, constrict & finally suffocate—& how the metaphor of the real open landscape can suddenly realise it, turn it wide & free to the lost illusion of all kinds of possibilities with the sun rising in an open sky spreading the day our before you freed from Miko Dwyer’s speculations on social scientific hypotheses & the brilliant insights of M Csikszentmihalyi’s observation that “Human beings appear to value two distinct sets of conditions. The first is pleasure, and it consists of genetically determined stimulation that the organism seeks out . . . The second condition that people seek out is enjoyment. Enjoyment differs from pleasure in that it is not a homeostatic process . . .”

  good God, can one imagine a greater damper for sheer JOY?

  I thought I heard Buddy Bolton shout

  Open up these windows, let some of this foul air out . . .

  I loved the one I discovered all this with here over the pond,

  or on the Acropolis

  or the Nevsky prospect

  and the Kremlin gate

  and the hotel courtyrad in the rue Jacob

  overlooking Lake Como

  or Butler’s pass to New Zealand’s South Island & Erewhon beyond

  and the Tiber

  and the Danube

  and the Rhine, the Thames, the Seine

  and the morning and the evening

  cannot be dimissed as an alcoholic haze,

  believe me.

  Miko Dwyer’s speculations: the name sociologist Thomas J. Cottle gives to a 10-year-girl who speculates that adults must give children joy, which she hasn’t known since her grandmother died; see his “Witness of Joy,” Dædalus 122.1 (Winter 1993): 135-36.

  M Csikszentmihalyi’s observation: on p. 40 of the same issue of Dædalus. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934– ) is a Hungarian-American psychology professor best known for his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, 1990), where he offers similar observations.

  I thought I’d heard [...] foul air out: a couplet from Jelly Roll Morton’s rendition of “Buddy Bolton’s Blues,” composed by African-American jazz cornetist Charles Bolden (1877–1931).

  Butler’s pass to [...] Erewhon: Butler’s Erewhon is set in New Zealand.

  To Donald Oresman

  Wainscott, NY

  20 April 1993

  Dear Donald,

  ‘No good deed goes unpunished’ as they say, hence in gratitude for your last researches here in the spirit of Sarah Bernhardt’s positively last farewell appearance.

  Does LEXIS® NEXIS® go so far back as 1834 to provide the context for Baron Parke’s classic phrase ‘going on a frolic of his own’ as cited by Prosser in Joel v. Morrison, 1834, 6 C. & P. 501, 172 Eng.Rep 1338[?]

  I’m glad you find A Frolic of His Own ‘by far the best’ [of proposed titles] & am quite settled on it. The above information is hardly vital since the phrase is explained loosely far into the text dialogue & might even be used as an epigraph if easily available the fuller context might provide even further entertainment, if not we shall certainly survive (carrying the notion further as one is inclined to do waking at 3 am, ‘going on a frolic of his own’ is in a world governed by laws really what the artist is eventually all about.

  best wishes again,

  Bill Gaddis

  Sarah Bernhardt: French actress (1844–1923).

  LEXIS® NEXIS®: online search services for legal documents and newspaper articles, respectively, now called LexisNexis.

  Joel v. Morrison: a case cited by Prosser in his Torts: “In 1834 Baron Parke uttered the classic phrase, that a master is not liable for the torts of his servant who is not at all on his master’s business, but is ‘going on a frolic of his own.’”

  To James Cappio

  21 May 1993

  Dear Jim Cappio.

  Many thanks for your note (& enclosures). I too have been feeling pangs of conscience over the hiatus.

  The book is done. Its title is

  A Frolic of His Own

  which came to me in reading

  Master & Servant lore, the Master (‘God’?) liable for his Servant (Jesus)’s tort while on the master’s business (Know ye not that I am on my Father’s business?) but not if the servant is off ‘on a frolic of his own’ (Joel v. Morrison, 1834, 6 C & P. 501, 172 Eng.Rep. 1338 by Baron Parke).

  The 640pp MS went in to Simon&Schuster/Poseidon in Feb after months of 5am days, copyread & marked for printer, returned to me for queries (Apr), returned to Poseidon via Federal Express, who lost it. A week of agony. They found it minus p. 638, 3 days recasting that, & it is now presumably in the hands of the printers; Poseidon (ed. Ann Patty) appear very pleased, most cooperative with me regarding various type faces (text, opinions &c), art title page &c & there should be galleys in a couple of weeks about the time I go in for prostatectomy to then review & revise at my convalescent leisure assuming of course that in the course of things I have not gone off on a frolic (nisi) of my own.

  I would hope to get you a set of galleys but this mayn’t be feasible & have to wait for the bound ones but will keep you advised.

  very best regards,

  Gaddis

  Know ye not [...] Father’s business?: Luke 2:49.

  nisi: Latin, “unless,” used in legal proceedings.

  To Robert Coover

  [American fabulist fiction writer (1932– ) and a professor at Brown University. Stephen Wright (1949– ) is another innovative novelist; his first novel, Meditations in Green, appeared in 1983.]

  Wainscott, New York 11975

  19 June 1993

  Dear Bob.

  I am glad to recommend Stephen Wright for any opening there may be on your teaching staff at Brown in the area of writing on the strength of my memory of having been impressed a few years ago reading through his novel Meditations in Green. I haven’t seen his subsequent works but the very fact of his having published a second and finished a third rather lengthy novel makes clear that he is committed to the work in all its wonder and drudgery and should, after evident talent, I think be the first qualification for spreading our plague among the young who want not to ‘be writers’ but to write.

  with regards,

  W. Gaddis

  To William H. Gass

  [Gass invited WG to participate in a symposium on “The Writer and Religion” that would be held at the International Writers Center at Washington University in October 1994. WG delivered a lecture entitled “Old Foes with New Faces,” which was publis
hed the following year in the Yale Review, and is reprinted (minus its final page) in RSP 88–108.]

  Wainscott

  25 Jne ’93

  Dear Bill,

  your invitation is irresistable—caveats about the ‘literary reading’ aspect of course though I assume we’ll have tangled with that in Hollywood (which does sound like ‘a gas’ if you pardon the expression I look forward to it) in fact, I was dizzied enough at first reading that I took it for this (’93) October as a launching pad for publication of a novel touching on this same topic* to appear in January following but of course by the appointed date all AMERICA will have read it & a bounty (cf Rushdie) on my head from the vested interests as noted below.

  And so I will hope to appear at your doorstep much like Prince K. in D’s Uncle’s Dream arriving at Mordasov ‘so decrepit, so worn out, that as one looked at him the thought instinctively occurred to one that in another minute he might drop to pieces’ having, last week, a 10year lithium battery pacemaker installed beneath the clavicle as a cautionary step before next week’s shaving of the prostate with other repairs to follow (‘the Prince had made a brilliant debut, he had led a gay life, flirted, had made several tours abroad, sang songs, made puns, and had at no period been distinguished by the brilliance of his intellectual gifts. Of course he had squandered all his fortune, and found himself in his old age without a farthing.’)

  *to the contrary notwithstanding I felt it wise to put you on notice of the sort of goods you are bargaining for & so enclose a sample here—it is as you see galley time at Oblomovka-by-the-Sea where it would be a great treat if you were passing through but failing that

  the warmest wishes to you both,

  Willie

  Hollywood: WG and Gass had been invited there for a program the following January; see 13 April 1994.

  Rushdie: Islamic extremists pronounced a death sentence on British writer Salman Rushdie (1947– ) after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.