And then suddenly realise, in the midst of all this thought, here I am 25 and my education is just beginning. Honestly I wonder what I “studied” at Harvard.
I do hope to save enough here to be able to afford to go back—not necessarily to Harvard, preferably abroad—and study. And if I can do that and finish a credible novel by the fall it will be splendid. Oddly the things I want to study are not things I did at Harvard. Philosophy, comparative religions, history, and language. Well God knows often my hands are so tired from handling cables &c. that I do not do very well with this pen.
This is just an outburst—and regard it as such; suddenly like the whole bourgeois soul being terrified at time’s passing, most especially furious to watch any of it wasted, as often the Canal seems to do. So much to learn and to think, no time for indulgences. I feel possessed. Soon will write a better letter.
Love,
W.
To Edith Gaddis
Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone
[15 January 1948]
dear Mother.
Many thanks for your letter. I can’t do anything else now—purely nervous temper—so shall try to write you. I mean I can’t work. It is 1030 in the morning, I am to go out to work at 230—and somehow can’t write. Largely this restriction on the typewriter and not being able to feel free and unrestrained—difficult anyway in the morning—and I can’t work. I don’t know what the right conditions are or even will be. Now I have the novel outlined, quite definitely (and continuously) in my mind. But for writing it that is the work. I am continuously upset, short tempered with most of the people I run into. I think what I shall do is work on here for about 3 more months, meanwhile reading, note-taking, trying to write. By then I should have saved around 300$. Then get a job on a boat going out of here for a couple of months. Then with a little money be able to do just as I wish. I don’t know. I can’t work unless it is in a place where I can come in at any hour of night put on lights and use the typewriter. We shall see. Meanwhile time is not being wasted I think because I am reading and thinking—sometimes with febrile excitement as a few days ago a play by Sartre called Les Mouches and also am making the money necessary to human dignity or at least solitary existence which is promised.
Of course letters from N.Y. excite me. I had a good one from Connie yesterday—and yours today with mention of Bernie &c. &c. You know he is rather simple, not a great mind—or at least not a good creative one (I am afraid, and he wants to be a good novelist, that is his tragedy, the more so since no one will see it as tragedy—can’t take him seriously for long)—and I know it is simply indulgence to myself that makes me like to be with him, but I do miss him he is so kind, and there are few of those.
The only New Orleans person I can think of is Fischer Hayes. God knows what he is doing with a magazine—it couldn’t be a very brilliant one. I heard he had married. Anyhow whatever the circumstances I should like to publish that story almost anywhere. So here is the next of the endless string of favours I ask of you. The name of the story—considerably rewritten since Hayes saw it—is “The Myth Remains.” You may remember reading it. It is in Massapequa, and in a manila envelop with other stories, God knows where. But probably either on or in my desk or on the balcony. Not among the envelops on the landing, those are Chandler’s (things I wouldn’t be caught dead writing!). If you could pick it up next time you are out there, and meanwhile I shall hope to hear from whoever this New O—person is and write you.
Just before picking up your letter this morning I sent one off to father—brief cheery I think newsy bit. The prospect of publishing anything excites me as always. Bad business.
Now I remember the name of Bernie’s clock is Thrill. And I should appreciate your sending me one very much. Yes the place is Tourneau—Madison at about 49th. (Lord how I miss New York!—You see what I am occupied with now is this whole business of the myth—tradition—where one belongs. And while disciplining myself to behave according as my intellect teaches me—that we are alone, and all of these vanities and seekings (the church, a wife, father &c.) are seekings for some myth by the use of which we can escape the truth of aloneness. Poor Bernie, he won’t accept it, nor Jake that more successfully. But that is the whole idea (message) of my novel. I’d rather talk with you about it, the letter is so unsatisfactory but I have to write it down. I am afraid my letters are getting worse, also handwriting.
Again many thanks for the check. And so happy to know you are having the pleasant (pleasant hell it sounds hilarious) winter you deserve.
Love,
Bill
Les Mouches: 1943 adaptation of the classical myth of Orestes and Electra avenging the death of their father; published in English translation by Stuart Gilbert in 1946 as The Flies.
Connie: probably Constance Smith: see note to 4 May 1948.
Fischer Hayes: called S. F. Hays in the next letter, apparently the painter “Sam Hays” mentioned earlier (9 March 1947).
Chandler’s: Brossard’s stories were however being published in little magazines at this time.
To Edith Gaddis
Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone
[19 January 1948]
dear Mother—
Just a note to say I have heard from S. F. Hays, with a prospectus of the new magazine, which looks highly creditible. And to entreat you, on your first trip to Massapequa, to pick up that M.S.—“The Myth Remains”. Now it must be in a large envelop with other stories, paper clipped. Not loose in a drawer—such might be an earlier version, and not to be shown. One of the other stories is “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.” Don’t bother with the other stories. I think the envelop has a large number 1 or I on the outside, and addressed to me from Harper’s Bazaar—almost certain it is on top of the desk. Will you please send it to:
Miss Cornelia P. Claiborne
153 East 48th Street, N.Y.C.—and meanwhile I have written her a note asking her to return it to you if she doesn’t want it.
Please pardon the outbursts I’ve been sending you. Now things are getting settled, I have a better system of time for myself. Coming in at midnight, I work on my novel until about 4 am—then sleep late. Tell G. S. B. to keep his shirt on. I am working hard, hope to have some money too when I show up there in the summer.
I am even drinking hot-water “lemon” juice when I get up! And have many good books from the library, and two new pairs of pants (not Chipp). The job isn’t bad, except for the often hours of inactivity which madden me, any wasting of time now does. But the new novel, with incredible slowness, pieces itself together. And worthwhile thought is rampant. If I can stay with this life for a few months, perhaps I can show up with first novel draft, but not dependent on its success—so if it doesn’t go I’ll have money next fall to go abroad and study and continue to write.
Now it is past noon—I must make my little lunch (ham sandwich, peanut-butter sandw., and onion sandwich) (I keep the food in a drawer of my dresser) and be off for the breadwinning.
Love to you,
Will
PS. Another favour, if this incarceration is to last. If you could put aside the book review sections of the Sunday Times, and send them to me every 3 or 4 weeks, I should appreciate it greatly. Haven’t seen it for so long, and get curious about current state of “literature”.
“In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madame”: an early version of Recktall Brown’s Christmas party in R (II.8). It was posthumously published in Ninth Letter 4.2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 113–17, and reprinted in Harper’s, August 2008, 29–32.
G. S. B.: unidentified.
Chipp: a men’s clothing store in Harvard Square and later in Manhattan.
To Katherine Anne Porter
[American short-story writer and novelist (1890–1980). WG wrote to praise her essay “Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait” in the December 1947 issue of Harper’s. (It was retitled “The Wooden Umbrella” in her Collected Essays.) He would write two more letters to her in April and May of 1948.]
Pedro Miguel, Cana
l Zone
21 january, 48
My dear Miss Porter.
A friend at Harper’s was kind enough to send me your address—I hope you don’t mind—when I wrote him asking for it, in order that I might be able to tell you how much your piece on Gertrude Stein provoked and cleared up and articulated for me.
To get this out of the way, I am one of the thousands of Harvard boys who never learned a trade, and are writing novels furiously with both hands. In order to avoid the mental waste (conversation &c.) that staying in New York imposes, I am here working on a crane on the canal and writing the inevitable novel at night.
I have never written such a letter as this—never felt impelled to (but once, in college, an outburst which I fortunately did not mail to Markova, after seeing her ‘Giselle’) —But your piece on Gertrude Stein—and your letter that accompanied it—kept me occupied for three days. And since I have no one here to talk with about it—thank heavens—I presume to write you. Having read very little of your work—remember being greatly impressed by ‘Pale Horse’—so none of that comes in.
How you have put the finger on Miss Stein. Because she has worried me—not for as long nor as intelligently as she has you certainly, but since I have come on so many acclamations of her work, read and been excited and cons[t]ernated, and not realised that emptiness until you told me about it. I read your piece just nodding ignorantly throughout, agreeing, failing to understand the failure in her which you were accounting. Expecting it to be simply another laudatory article like so many that explain and analyse an artist away, into senseless admiration (the kind Mr. Maugham is managing now in Atlantic). Toward the end of your piece I was seriously troubled—how far can a writers’ writer go? (V. “She and Alice B. Toklas enjoyed both the wars—”) —until I found your letter in the front of the magasine. Then I began to understand, and started the investigation with you again. Thank God someone has found her defeat, and accused her of it. And it was a great thing because it should teach us afterward places where the answer is not.
Certainly she did it with a monumental thoroughness. Now “Everything being equal, unimportant in itself, important because it happened to her and she was writing about it”—was a great trick. And: “her judgements were neither moral nor intellectual, and least of all aesthetic, indeed they were not even judgements—” which in this time of people judging people is in a way admirable. But that her nihilism was, eventually, culpable—and that her rewards did finally reach her, “struggling to unfold” as she did, all wrong somehow and almost knowing it. Her absolute denial of responsibility—and this is what always troubled me most—made so much possible. And how your clearly-accounted accusation shows the result.
It must have been a fantastically big talent—and I feel that we are fortunate that she used it as she did, teaching by that example (when understood, as your piece helped me to do)—for in our time if we do not understand and recognise the responsibility of freedom we are lost.
I should look forward to a piece on Waugh; though mine is the accepted blithe opinion of “a very clever one who knew he was writing for a very sick time.”
Thank you again, for writing what you did, and for allowing this letter.
Sincerely,
William Gaddis
Markova [...] ‘Giselle’: Alicia Markova (1910–2004), English ballerina, known for her starring role in Adolphe Adam’s ballet standard Giselle (1841).
‘Pale Horse’: in Porter’s short-story collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939).
V.: an old scholarly abbreviation (vide: see) that WG occasionally uses.
Mr. Maugham: W. Somerset Maugham: English novelist and playwright (1874–1965). In 1947 Maugham began publishing a series of appreciative essays on classic authors like Flaubert, Fielding, Balzac, et al.
your letter: Porter explains that she has read virtually all of Stein’s books and that Stein “has had, I realize, a horrid fascination for me, really horrid, for I have a horror of her kind of mind and being; she was one of the blights and symptoms of her very sick times.”
Waugh: Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), English novelist (see letter of January 1949). Porter writes in the aforementioned letter in Harper’s that long ago she read Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932) and felt “that he was either a very sick man or a very clever one who knew he was writing for a very sick time.”
To Edith Gaddis
Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone
[23 January 1948]
dear Mother—
Thanks, thanks again. And for having been so good as to take care of June Kingsbury. I must write them a letter. But can’t think of them at the moment, somehow makes me nervous to do so.
If your letter sounded lecturish certainly it was warranted by the outbursts I’ve been sending you. For which I apologise. I think I am getting hold now: the job, though still at times maddening when I am unoccupied, goes on with a minimum of difficulty. And the novel (in the most excruciating handwriting you have ever seen) is now two unfinished chapters, but I think good, and am comparatively happy about it—when it goes well I am fine, when not; unbearable. A black girl in the place where I eat occasionally accuses me of looking “vexed”—which in this West-Indian dialect means angry. So I tell her I’m vexed at the small portion she has put on my plate, and she tries to make up for it.
Two good letters from John Snow, to which I sent a rather excited answer—he probably thinks me insane by now. Also Eric Larrabee at Harper’s sent me the address of Katherine Anne Porter, a modern writer of some repute, and I have written her to say how much I enjoyed her piece on Gertrude Stein in the recent Harpers. Never done such a thing before, but that article certainly warranted it. Correspondence a good thing, though even it often seems a waste to me.
Please excuse my haste—my “lunch” (a munificent affair—one ham-cheese, one onion-cheese, one peanut-butter-marmalade sandw., all made by my busy hands) hangs from the light cord, so the ants won’t get it—and I must pull it down and be off.
Love
Bill
June Kingsbury: wife of WG’s Merricourt’s headmaster.
Eric Larrabee: (1922–90), managing editor of Harper’s from 1946 to 1958; WG met him at Harvard.
To Edith Gaddis
Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone
[29 January 1948]
dear Mother.
I have got the clock. What a charming little thing it is! to have the onerous duty of rousing me from good sleep or a good book—and I am finding so many—to send me out to the enclosed scene. And many thanks for sending off that story. Yes, it is supposed to end as you quote it—heaven knows if it should or not—but I can’t tell now, it is none of my concern now the thing is written I am through with it.
The lemon juice is me trying to see if there is anything in this world or the next that will make or let my face be itself without those horrible ‘things’—and at the moment it seems to be working! though it may be simply that the life I lead is one of exemplary dullness and regularity. But I shall continue the experiment—Lord, if it is as simple as that, a lemon a day. I can hardly think so.
Each of my letters, you know by now, asks some favour of you. This one is less involved than many—a book which I can’t get down here. In fact you may not be able to in N.Y.—it being only recently out in France. The author is named Rousset; the title La Vie Concentrationaire or Le Monde Concentrationaire. You might try a store called Coin de France on 48th St, or Brentano; and there’s a good French book store on that Radio City promenade. Don’t give too much effort to it, it may well not be available. [...]
A splendid letter from Jacob—after so many of the talks, the scenes I have been through with him, what I have seen him go through, you may imagine how happy I am that he can write: “When I’m alone I’m more content than I’ve been in years . . .” not that I don’t watch him with some element of unChristian jealousy!
Your mention of my “plans” sounding “glorious” is somewhat disconcerting. I must confess, they do
not at all hold consistent, even from day to day. The illusion of studying again—at Oxford or Zurich or Neuchatel—something which I allow myself to indulge occasionally. If when the time comes I can manage it, all the better. But hardly ‘plans’! At least I am (1) earning and saving (2) thinking reading and writing—which is not time wasted dreaming. The novel harrows me all the time, sometimes it looks all right, at others impossible. (The latter at the moment). It must take time and quiet writing: there is so much of desperation in it, that it cannot be written in desperation, if you follow me.
One thing though: to keep away from America. Except for New York and Long Island, but America I have such pity for, fury at, why are Americans so awful, their voices, everything. You can’t imagine Pedro Miguel, what the Americans have done in “civilising” this strip called Canal Zone, how they have sterilized it. And why do they feel it incumbent upon them to behave with rudeness everywhere away from home? Barren ignorance is most horrible when it is in power—the picture of the American soldier abroad will never cease to make me shudder. And the prospect of another war, wanting to fight the good fight and not finding it in my country’s side, worst of all.
Sorry to end on a dismal note—end of paper.
Love,
W.
Rousset: L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946) by French political activist David Rousset (1912–97) is about the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where he was imprisoned. It was published in English translation as A World Apart in 1951.
To Ida Williams Way
Pedro Miguel, Canal Zone
18 February 1948
dear Granga.
Many thanks for the Keystone View offer. I have been sitting over 3pm breakfast (I worked until 7 this morning) trying to think it out clearly. But first let me give you an idea of my present circumstances. I am, you know, spending all of my free time working on this novel; some times it looks good to me—as though it deserves all my time—and some times quite worthless. So clearly I am in no position to judge, and the only thing to do is to continue to work on it. Except for the fact that I lead a compleatly lonely life here, this life isn’t too conducive to writing and clear thinking. Living in a large building where I can’t use my typewriter because of other men resting &c. is one thing; then the Canal Zone, which is a sterile American monstrosity; and the job, which takes a good deal out of me. I am hoping now to hang on for about 8 more weeks, until early in April. And since I am living very close to the wall, spending as little as possible, by then I should have around 500$ put by, enough to travel down here, settle somewhere for a little while and write unhindered. Plan to be back in N.Y. around the middle of June.