B007RT1UH4 EBOK
Page 72
6. Agapē Agape, 1994–1998
To Sarah Gaddis
[At this time, Sarah was working in the press office of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which was mounting an exhibition of William S. Burroughs’s “shotgun paintings.”]
Wainscott
30 March 94
dear Sarah,
I know what you mean about meaning to sit down & write a long letter but the weekends end up with errands & & & except that I’ve got no real excuse, think I’ll call & the time difference interferes then make the weekend try but the line’s busy which frustrates but really pleases me because it means that you are busy & leading a real life after the time you’ve put in on one so poorly furnished; but I forget, we (esp east coast here) forget about earthquakes till another 5.6 is all over the evening news diverted, today, by people staring vacantly at homes & the sad small lives laid to waste in Georgia tornados—I mean here I am still dining out on my earthquake anecdote until you remind me that for you & those around you it is a constant presence, your remark about a subliminal lack of concentration in people & things they forgot to do or did wrong & knowing your earlier distress over them admire you going right on, but at this cost, it is like some overwhelming fiction (the terms I think in) esp the Hollywood set image inserting epoxy in the walls like I felt that one night of it in the “Ritz Carlton”.
But thank you for the packet you sent reviews & all, I hadn’t known of St Moore’s for the Nation & have certainly done well but trying to get S&S to spend another 50¢ on an ad is hopeless, they say they’ll make a big splash when they bring it out as the lead book in their new fancy Scribner’s (which they took over) trade paperback series end of the year . . . another year! Lord how they go by. The woman on book jackets is quite intriguing I only wish she’d seen ours but Sarah the ART world I confess is simply beyond me aware that I am a minority of 1 & how oddly a leading postmodernist in fiction but Bill Burroughs with his ‘lost images’ in the catalogue . . . & to think I’ve got a copy of his first paperback Junkie inscribed (in soft pencil) ‘To Bill Gaddis who knew me before I knew myself’ . . . at any rate I am so pleased (& proud) that you are out in front with what’s going on in the world & handling it so well stress & all, stress of course being a vital part of it or what is the art itself all about? And not to add to it though I know it must be something you & the women you work with must discuss frequently but I do (like most parents I’m sure) worry about you & all the wildness loose in the world, things like carjackings (do you lock your car doors when you get in? take a careful look at the shopping mall parking lots?) the list is endless & could drive one crazy & there’s finally no hiding place.
I mainly wander about literally & figuratively (in the head) vaguely considering what to do, I mean work on, next, going through old notes & papers, does anyone need A Secret History of the Player Piano? & getting something together to speak about in Albany the 14th & the college at Stonybrook later, part of the price of my NYState Authorhood & the money already gone to pay taxes on the Lannan prize . . . Your brother incidentally is right now presumably in New Orleans, sketch for a film project on his pal Jack’s legal tussles & I’m simply glad of his getting out of town finally for a few days’ change.
much love always
Papa
my earthquake anecdote: WG was in Los Angeles for a Lannan event when a strong earthquake struck on the early morning of 17 January 1994.
St Moore’s for the Nation: “Reading the Riot Act,” 25 April [sic] 1994, pp. 569–71.
To James M. Morris
[Author and editor-at-large for the Wilson Quarterly. At the urging of feminist Betty Friedan (a Hamptons friend of WG and Mrs. Murphy), he invited WG to give a lecture at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. WG gave a casual talk there on 7 December 1994.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
10 April 1994
Dear Mr Morris.
Thank you for your letter & your invitation to talk. I am sorry to be so long responding but take refuge in the welcome provision that it may be later this year or even early next.
Most welcome however is the proposal that it be for a talk rather than a ‘reading’. On occasions when I’ve been asked to do the latter I’ve answered if at all with an offer to speak on why I do not give readings &—shades of Dylan Thomas ‘traveling 200 miles just to recite, in my fruity voice, poems that would not be appreciated & could, anyway, be read in books’—don’t see why anyone else does except for the toxin of this ‘in performance’ culture. My only concern would be that since what I put on the page is more structured & disciplined than the informal somewhat rambling nature of a talk, transcribing such a talk for publication as you mention puts me off a bit but I’m sure could be resolved.
Further, from the material you enclosed, the aims & atmosphere of the Wilson Center sound most congenial to my ways of thinking & I hope we can work something out along the lines you suggest; & finally, thanks for your warm estimate of my books especially this last.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
To Michael Silverblatt
[Creator and host of Bookworm, a literary radio program broadcast since 1989 by KCRW in Los Angeles, and underwritten by the Lannan Foundation. On 18 January 1994 Silverblatt hosted an event at which William H. Gass spoke on WG, who then spoke briefly. At this time, Lannan’s Jeannie Kim expressed concerns about the program’s direction; the Kurt mentioned below was her assistant.]
Wainscott NY 11975
13 April 1994
Dear Michael,
word has reached me of some of the pressures you are under involving Lannan’s literary program & I hope they will dissipate before things come to some sort of bureaucratic grief.
I thought (& was later told) that our presentation in January came off quite successfully, & I certainly felt I had you & Bill Gass to thank for making it more than just another of these ubiquitous ‘readings’. Gass is for me our foremost writer, a magician with the language, & it was he who’d told me before I came out there of your deep commitment to literature as your thoughtful probing confirmed, opposed to the interviewer asking whether one uses a word processor & on which side of the paper do you write?
What it all finally comes down to I suppose is what sort of writer & what sort of audience such a program wishes to attract, the difference between entertainment & exploration of ideas, of what writing & the serious writer are all about or an audience that can say I saw Irving Wallace in person on television last night, all adding up to how seriously such a literary program’s sponsor’s name is taken by its peers & any serious writer quickly spots the difference. We’re not up there reciting recipes for tapioca pudding to make some insecure bureaucrat look good after all.
A propos, when you see Kurt will you thank him for sending me the Heaney version of Philoctetes we’d discussed out there, now here again is a really good man with real ties to literature who is far too valuable to be relegated as someone’s nameless bureaucratic ‘assistant’ in what armed service slang appropriately refers to as Mickey Mouse. In situations like this one I think there’s a lot to be said for running a loose ship.
Good luck and best regards,
W. Gaddis
Irving Wallace: best-selling American novelist (1916–90).
Heaney version of Philoctetes: The Cure at Troy (1990) is the Irish poet and translator Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes.
To Isabel and John Butterfield
[Old British friends whom WG saw while in England for the publication there of FHO.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
30 June 1994
dear Isabel & John,
how can civility—the mere civility of a note of gratitude to old & dear friends—have fallen to such low estate as it nears a month since I have left you? In some part it may be explained (if not excused) in the enclosed FAX I just faxed to my publishers, having flown (literally) from that week of order & indulgence, of correct & thoughtful & gener
ous behaviour on all sides, to be plunged immediately back into the Psychopathology of Everyday Life maintained all too familiarly here, leaving the accourtrements of civilised life where we left them behind 200+ years ago. Dinner in the House of Lords! I mutter to gaping friends over undergrilled fish & marble-hard potato salad; addressing a select (albeit rather small) audience in London University’s Senate Room; devouring a haunch of beef in the shade of Evelyn Waugh at the Hyde Park Motel, recounted over hash at a kitchen table; a Publication Dinner (roast wood pigeon) at Lauceston Place, retailed to my publisher here who has never come up with so much as a burger at Burger King . . . All of it crowned by your warm embrace, it was a stunning time.
And I have got to say (in an immediate & similarly inexcusably delayed note to her) how deeply struck & touched I was by Mathilde’s warmth & care & sheer courage had never reached me so strongly, what we call ‘character’ I suppose in its lonely strength, ‘blood will tell’ as archie told mehitabel, breaks your heart.
The road ahead (ahead?) here is off like the course of, who was it? mounting his horse & ‘riding off in all directions’, tempting the novelist to descend to yet untold depths (‘The writer will always sell you out’ says Joan Didion) though I hasten to add you both must come off quite unscathed in the event, if event there is to be frankly at the moment I’ve scarcely the appetite for it though the possibility nay perhaps the necessity of grovelling for another advance suggests itself so me & mine are not to be seen in the Edgeware Road singing ‘Back and side go bare, go bare, but belly God give thee good ale . . .’
with love and thanks again
as these things become more precious,
Willie
Psychopathology of Everyday Life: title of one of Freud’s best-known books (1901). as archie told mehitabel: “archy” the free-verse-typing cockroach and his alley-cat friend from Don Marquis’s popular newspaper columns of the 1910s and 1920s.
‘riding off in all directions’: a famous line from one of Canadian author Stephen Leacock’s Nonsense Novels (1911): “Lord Ronald [...] flung himself upon his horse and road madly off in all directions” (ODQ). ‘The writer [...] says Joan Didion: correctly, “writers are always selling somebody out,” the concluding sentence of her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1968).
‘Back and side [...] good ale’: from a song in William Stevenson’s Elizabethan comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle: “Back and side go bare, go bare / [...] / But belly God send thee good ale enough” (ODQ).
To Stanley Elkin
[Elkin’s 1985 novel The Magic Kingdom features a character named Charles Mudd-Gaddis, an eight-year-old geriatric who “dreams of his first birthday. He dreams the cake and dreams the candles, dreams the balloons and dreams the streamers; he dreams the toys, he dreams the clapping. And dreams he’s three, the little boy, who would have been a man by now—twenty, twenty-one. Then dreams the girl, six, to him a woman. And now he’s five and pushing forty. Ah, to be thirty-four again! he dreams. And dreams he’s seven and confusion comes, that white aphasia of the heart and head. And dreams in awful clarity it’s now, and can’t recall how old he really is” (Dutton, 1985, 80).]
9 November ’94
dear Stanley,
I had been vaguely troubled by Mudd-Gaddis since first stumbling upon him & seeing you again in such fine fettle thought to get back & give him a closer look. And was stunned. How do you do it? How (p. 80) did you know! Staggers. Though perhaps 10 years ago it mightn’t have fit so well, but prescient my God it’s I, it’s me today that brief touching elegant agonizing profile believe me real age 72 is daily more infringed by that blond pageboy off to boarding school age 5 & the confusion does come, “that white aphasia of the heart and head” sheer poetry, break those 10 lines up into 20 & what a poem it is (looking about today at what passes for ‘poetry’) in its ‘awful clarity’ for a stupefying epitaph however you may have meant it (in deconstruction’s disavowing the author’s intent) I have taken it to heart.
good weather & warmest wishes to you both
Gaddis
To Judith Gaddis
[Typed on the back of a Harvard newsletter regarding WG’s 50th class reunion.]
Wainscott
15 Jan. ’95
Dear Judith,
response of sorts to your long delightful multitypeface (this is still the toy Olivetti I gave Sarah off to George School) letter & handsome letterhead (see other side) of, dare I say it? last September . . . but frankly it seems much longer ago than that, upheavals on every front: outrage at the publisher’s failure to advertise, then the Book Award (sound paintfully familiar? but not entirely broke this time); health coming & going, travel slowed by those decades of tobacco but no whisky now for some 5 years (a little wine with dinner); the last couple of months a kind of running horror of being asked to give ‘readings’ & getting up to give a presentation on why I don’t give readings & don’t think anyone else should, why did we invent the printed page? the whole vain nonsense of ‘writers in performance’, everything is performance; & ‘book signings’ . . . none of it to do with the work itself, please! [...]
And now when it would seem that one could finally sit down & gape at the Golden Years the success of this last book makes a profitable opportunity for the next one which I suppose must be taken advantage of though I’ve no idea what it would be ‘about’ but as J R said at some point —Even when you win you have to keep playing [p. 647]. [...]
and so good to hear you sounding well & in such good spirits
W.
To Sarah Gaddis
[Typed on the back of a photocopy of an article on WG in the French newspaper Le Monde.]
Wainscott
7 Feb. 95
Dear Sarah,
well! Which would we prefer, Le Monde or the ‘Pulitzer Prize’ —I’ll settle for the French, after what Oscar had to say about the Pulitzer on page 369 and these people picked up and attributed to me! Well, so long Pulitzer (I think they hand them out in April)(in case anyone got as far as p. 369 which I’d doubt, Oscar is right). Lord knows what this Book Critics Award thing is, I think no $$ just the ‘prestige’ (who needs it) . . .
At least, after hearing you on the phone last night, I can reread your letter & feel that at least you can take a good deal of satisfaction in your work & how well you have done it & that there are some serious people around who are aware of it & appreciate it but believe me recalling those 5 Pfizer years, & now seeing your ‘boss’ (from outside thank God) so perfectly cloned in this cheery dense utterly self-centered ‘cute’ bird-brain at S&S I feel for you, how consistently these ridiculous people get themselves into positions of power is one of the great sad commentaries on our times but all this is cold comfort I know + the fact that they can turn quite vicious if ‘crossed’ . . . the only revenge probably a short novel about such a scene but of course that’s been done too (though there’s always room for one more if well done: take notes! (right down to the lipstick smear on her teeth as I did with Miss Flesch in J R who was ‘inspired’ by this ghastly woman at Pfizer) . . .)
Meanwhile I’m simply fiddling around trying to dredge up some idea for a project both to keep my mind in 1 piece & to embark on a regular income from S&S or Knopf &c, & very sadly meanwhile here again Candida in difficulty in hospital with a leg/foot operation, some rare circulatory problem that will leave her impaired & a long and painful haul & I am trying to convice her to sell her agency & retire &c, count our blessings as they say but at what cost!
much love again,
Papa
Pulitzer on page 369: “—The Pu, good Good talk about being famous for five minutes the Pulitzer Prize is a gimcrack out of journalism school you wrap the fish in tomorrow, talk about the great unwashed it’s got nothing to do with literature or great drama it’s the hallmark of mediocrity and you’ll never live it down [...].” WG’s low opinion of the Pulitzers is also expressed in his letter of 1 May 1990 and in AA (60–62).
&n
bsp; Book Critics Award: the National Book Critics Circle gives out awards every spring. FHO was a finalist for the 1994 fiction award but lost to Carol Shield’s Stone Diaries.
Miss Flesch in J R: a “curriculum specialist” at J R’s school, later hired as “project director” (and Thomas Eigen’s boss) at Typhon International (=Pfizer). Miss Flesch’s lipstick-smeared teeth are noted at her first appearance in the novel (22).
To Muriel Oxenberg Murphy
[A fax without salutation entitled “In the Style of Thomas Bernhard.” WG describes the end of their relationship in the manner of the Austrian writer’s 1970 novel The Lime Works, in which a narrator tells the disjointed story of an eccentric writer named Konrad who has just killed his wife, drawing on hearsay by characters like Konrad’s acquaintance Fro. The opening paragraph is from pages 128–29 of Sophie Wilkins’s translation (Knopf, 1973); WG photocopied the same passage and sent it to Greg Comnes in 1996 with a note saying “You may see where I have found my Cicero for all future engagements.” WG’s final novel AA is very much “in the style of Thomas Bernard.”]
Feb. 17’95
“Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought . . . In any case, words were bringing everything down, Konrad said. Depression derives from words, nothing else . . . It was comforting, one of those rare times when one feels that everything is possible again, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. Suddenly everything . . .