My sense of humour is somewhat in suspension—also other senses, and so my apologies for the dullness of this note. I find the Atlantic ocean very big, life very long, and thoughts far away and sentimental, as not to bear repeating. But Madrid and I will purge one another, and soon enough I shall be able to write to your pleasure and edification.
Meanwhile, best wishes, love, gratitude to you.
W.
Mulberry street: runs through Little Italy in lower Manhattan. dolce Napoli: “sweet Naples.”
Baedeker: WG took with him Karl Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal: Handbook for Travellers, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1913), which is quoted a few times in R.
Mr. Hall: Charles Hall.
“like a dead mackeral [...] in the moonlight”: Virginian congressman John Randolph (1773–1833) famously said of a political rival, “He shines and stinks like a rotten mackerel by moonlight” (variously reported).
1837 East 15th street: apparently Mrs. Gaddis’s city address.
To Edith Gaddis
[c/o United States Embassy
Miguel Angel, 8
Madrid, Spain]
[21 December 1948]
Querida Mamacita (which means Dear Mother:) Aqui es una carta (a letter
And what to say? (CRY cry what shall I cry, says Mr Eliot . . .) except that apparently I am really in MADRID; and that I have had the very good fortune to meet a fellow whom I had met in NewYork about two years ago . . . and he very kind, pleasant; I cannot say how good to come on such a one, after a rather distasteful mess at Gibraltar with British Customs (something about money, the more fool I) and a 26hr train-ride from Algeciras to Madrid, and the consequent exhaustion.
Let me say: you know what is odd (odd to me, though Emerson makes a great point of this, and I suppose that I shall understand it one day) is this notion of cities’ similarity, the perpetual RITZ, or Greenwich Village, anywhere ones goes. That is the foolery, of writing you from SPAIN with Spanish stamps & Legend incumbent: when all the capitals are the same, the cities . . . and that ultimately there is no Romanticism about it anywhere. That travel as one will: to see the cork trees of southern Spain, the groves of olive trees: you know, the olive trees look quite exactly as our little willow (not weeping); or Gibraltar, fabulous creature that I knew (from the Prudential Life Insurance ads) was simply a great pile of shale, and, while not a “disappointment”, not the Thrill that the American demands when he has paid a passage to Africa? to Europe? to Asia? (Life is very long . . . . . .)
Eh bien. (that’s French)—enough of these wanderings into things which engage my attention . . . (indeed, my whole being, whenever I can abstract that ephemeral disaster) and down to the facts that one usually “writes home” about . . . :
Here is an address, since I have not as yet got anything which might be considered ‘permanent’—and instead have met (God forbid, but He did not) met a young lady (Life is very long) from the American consulate: [... (see above)] And this address only if you have a letter; because for the moment I am well-enough “fixed” (to tell the truth, compleatly mixed-up with this wad of innominate bills in my pockets, but I am so tired of trying to think about MONEY $$$ £££ Pesetas &&&&&.) that the purpose of all of this note is simply greeting; that I can well imagine that you worry, or wonder, &c. Because I have been here for 2 or 3 days & not written, even to say I am in Spain (Well now I am in Avon, the more fool I./ When I was at home I was in a better place/ But travellers must be content . . .)
Anyhow there is neither light nor water in Madrid until 6pm (no rain here for many months) and so this shaving in darkness and attempting to bathe is a mummery; in fact the whole thing is a mummery; and They don’t know it but I must find it out or the whole expedition will be wasted (although the two people who Do know it are Sherry & Jacob Bean, & look at them!) . . .
Really! To be introduced as the AMERican friend, here to study philosophy (here meaning Spanish mysticism of the 16th century is preposterous. But then (unless you point at the youth who studies thermodynamics (V. J Osbourne) what end study? I don’t know; John Woodburn almost knows, but almost and in that qualification lies defeat.
No, withall, it is better to have the imposition of aloneness come from the Outside, and so be insisted on the internal sense of disaster, than to brood over it in surroundings which in their cardboard familiarity say, Yes. All of these words to say that I am simply in another City; where there are mostly a bunch of foreigners (Spic) and must and shall learn their language for the ordinary commerce of life; while I can be left alone with my own language which needs a lot of explaining and apology before it can be used Cleanly and with positiveness (even though this is only used to say No)
Eh bien. I am looking for a pension, or, better, a large room where I can be Left Alone.
And when I find it, shall send its address (for the moment having enough clean shirts to call at the AMERICAN Embassy); and plan to stay here for a couple of months (because on the level it offers itself to me Madrid is not Spain but simply a Great City) until I have the language enough to go into the country—to Sevilla, to Granada, Malaga . . . I don’t know; anyhow that for now I am all right: and that should any of the usual American troubles come up this fellow Taylor will tell me the right direction in which to decamp. For Money, I shall write soon enough to make the arrangements about legal & illegal demonstrations, on ‘our’ part. So don’t worry about That.
And for Christmas, don’t worry about That as far as I am concerned. I plan to be wandering through the streets of a city, trying to figure out Christmas as opposed to Xmas, and as ‘happy’ as one may be in the natural state of aloneness. (BUT Mother, don’t take my seriousness about myself as seriously as I take it; because you know well enough that any day now you may have a letter shouting with glee about some fool thing or other which makes about as much difference in the Scheme as forebodings . . .)
And so: “A merry Christmas &c &c to all” and otherwise best greetings to Granga, to the Woodburns, to pretty in-New-York Nancy A.—and rest assured, I shall write better soon.
with love,
W.
cry what shall I cry: the opening line of “Difficulties of a Statesman” (part 2 of Eliot’s unfinished Coriolan).
Emerson [...] cities’ similarity: unidentified (Well now I am in Avon [...]: slightly misquoted (Arden for Avon) from Touchstone’s observation in As You Like It (2.4.12–14), WG’s favorite Shakespeare play.
Sherry: Sheri Martinelli; see headnote to letter of Summer 1953.
John Woodburn: an editor at Little, Brown, best known for snatching up Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) after Harcourt, Brace turned it down.
Taylor: Bill Taylor, a Harvard alum about five years older than WG.
Nancy A.: mentioned later, otherwise unknown.
To Edith Gaddis
Madrid
25 December, 48
dear Mother.
I am glad that I have waited this long to write you at any length; because today is the first day I have felt good about the whole thing; in fact more at peace than I have ever been in some time, years perhaps; & without the cloud of Mr TS Eliot’s articulation (. . . because I do not hope to turn again &c) hanging over every thought and gesture. And so I believe that I can write you a letter, instead of posting simply another quiet communication of despair: feeling alone again: and here is now it came about:
This morning I got up early (7:30 is wee hours for Madrid) and took a train out to a place some 3miles off called El Escorial. There is situated the royal monastery which Philip II built, in the latter 16th century, and if Mr Hall has seen it he will attest to its magnificence, if only on a scale of geometrical grandeur. Here are some figures from Baedeker, first off, to give you a notion: in the entire building there are said to be 16courts, 267windows, 1200doors, 86staircases, 89fountains; total length of the corridors about 100miles! I got to the town in the earliest morning, cool, and open—that is what did it, the air, and the 1mile uphill wa
lk, then the birds making such wondrous busy morning noise around the towers of that great weight of a building. The land is rocky, off to the east mountains snow-capped and down before the great open ragged plain toward Madrid. Throughout the day, when I was not in the monastery, I did a great deal of walking, and climbing, up behind the town to look down: the purgative effect of climbing. Often it was as I imagine the Tyrol. But the sound of a brook running, of burros braying: one suddenly realises that one’s senses have fallen into disuse in the abuses of the city, and suddenly is aware of sounds, of smell—even the delicious freshness of cow manure.
After first coffee I went into the church which is the centre of this gigantic affair, and there attended the Christmas morning mass: oh! such ritual, what a myth they have. And in this setting; imagine, the retablo behind the high altar is 98feet high, and the dome under which I attended 215feet high. And then the endless tour through the building; the burial vault of the Spanish kings under the altar, such marble, and gilt, and work: sarcophagi of black marble; rooms with paintings by El Greco, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Velasquez; a room exhibiting books & manuscripts from the 9th century on, with illuminations in colours & gold in the most fantastic meticulousness;
And so it was. & it was this sudden being outside that was so good, that showed me that I must not spend any more time than necessary in Madrid, which is simply a city. I have now got a room in a pension, and a good-sized room & comfortable, with meals for 40pesetas a day. Meals though: breakfast a small bowl of coffee & a stump of bread; lunch at 2pm: bean soup & then the body of a fish which has been done to a horrible death by fire; supper at 10pm: soup, followed by very strange croquettes, or cutlets, or ‘meat’balls, & a piece of fruit. I don’t think anyone eats with very great relish in Spain. But am having some difficulty with the cigarette business; American are impossibly expensive (& you cannot send any in) & the Spanish make their own with tobacco bought on ration. So I have about 20 left, and hoard them miserably. Eh bien.
This American fellow, Bill Taylor, has been excellent to me, but has gone to Paris for the holidays; I look forward to seeing him on his return; and otherwise am baited by a compleat idiot to whom kind Juancho recommended me (J. really wrote my introduction to the father, who is an intelligent gentleman but doesn’t speak English) and so I see occasionally this fool Luis, who is 29, & somewhere has been misinformed to the extent that he believes he can speak English. Oh it is painful, almost burlesque at times: he goes at it with heroic enthusiasm, and the results might be amusing if there were not, as there usually is, something at stake. But this sort of noodle: we plan (with Herculean effort on both parts) to dine, he to meet me at 10; I wait, miss ‘dinner’ here, & at 10:40 he calls to say ‘I can’t go.’ And such politeness, delight, good intentions. oh dear.
I cannot say much better for my own conquest of the other language; I am tampering with it to some extent successfully in conversation, but it will take much more doing. And so as for plans I have none, in the way of study. I do think that before too long, perhaps about 3weeks, I shall leave Madrid and go down to stay at Sevilla; but I shall let you know, certainly, and the US Embassy address in Madrid will get me eventually. And so: if the tenants come through, will you please send half in a draft payable, if they are to make it thus, to me at the bank of spain; & the rest just cashiers check (which, I must add, must be received by the 16th of January, as that is when my visa runs out). Life here is not at all as cheap as I had hoped, but I do believe it is working out. And how wonderful that it can really be happening. Of course I have the constant feeling of the press it must make on you, and wondering always how you are making out, how you can make out, and as I foolishly repeat, eternally grateful.
What with the holidays—and I must admit to a good dose of sentimental loneliness—I had thought of sending you a cable; but finally it was too late to send it to the Edison & I did not know what your address is now. And so I sent no cable, not even the smallest gift; but again, one day I shall make up for these ingracious silences. This experience now is certainly the biggest of my life, and it will eventually be turned profitably. And so I hope that you are having good holidays, have had a good Christmas today, and that the New Year will be a celebration for you of the sort you wish. I think of nothing more just now; shall write again soon, and my best wishes to ‘all those others’.
and love to you,
W.
because I do not hope to turn again: the opening line of “Ash Wednesday” (1930).
El Escorial: called San Zwingli in R; both Rev. Gwyon (I.1) and Wyatt (III.3) visit it.
Tyrol: the mountainous region between Italy and Austria.
sound of a brook running [...] cow manure: counterfeiter Frank Sinisterra (calling himself Mr. Yák at this point) also visits San Zwingli: “With this spring in his step he was soon up behind the town, where the sound of running water nearby, the braying of burros and the desultory tinkling of bells [...] reached him where he paused to sniff, and then stood still inhaling the pines above him and the delicious freshness of cow manure, like a man rediscovering senses long forgotten under the abuses of cities” (R 776).
tenants: WG received the rent on the house in Massapequa, his major source of income until the mid 1950s.
To Edith Gaddis
Madrid
[27 December 1948]
Well well; dear Mother again.
I had put this off until getting up to the Embassy, both to look for mail & to query Our Representative on the usual concerns of an innocent abroad. And so now I have been, queried & been queried, and got your letters. It is a nice feeling, a kind of re-affirmation of one’s identity after many days wandering in boats, trains, dark hotel rooms and strange cities, to see a familiar hand, read familiar words and names (in, I add vehemently, a familiar language). And many thanks for Barney’s note, a delight as always; but he of course is by now a rather continental person; and writes: —Spain sounds like a splendid thing, and it would be good to see you . . . he just off for a little time in Paris France &c. These fellow creatures of mine who have made Europe into one large madhouse, each capital a room, and they running from room-to-room, screaming & giggling (to use a phrase of Barney’s) . . . well it is all beyond me.
By now I feel settled in a way, not for life in Madrid, but I mean mentally; such things as actually getting letters here makes it seem that I am still in the same world and not barefoot in South Africa as I felt earlier (though a rather glacial South Africa to be sure). But with this good-sized room and large window, pleasant girls among the ‘help’ who applaud my Spanish, and getting used to the food which is not bad, I suppose one might say dull, but food. And having been fortunate in my choice of books & papers brought over with me, some of Eliot I had not read which is The Answer (just this fragment, listen:
“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion . . .” &c. But best his speaking of time, and just in line with Bergson, whom I was reading last summer, and all of it in line exactly with my attempts at thought and clear picturing of us all here &c &c. . . you know how this can go on, as it did many evenings before the fireplace in Massapequa, evenings I look back on with very poignant fondness; and apologise now for the rantings & ravings I subjected you to concerning The State of the Union & Mr Tennessee Williams (whose work, on reconsideration, I find: that he is not to be blamed, pilloried, s
pat upon (as was my attitude) because it is bad, because his work is simply a projection of the times, the degeneration of the Myth & the consequent looking from every heart for ‘a cheap sentimental humanism at someone else’s expense’—and wherebetter found than the theatre, where one does not have to leave the sticky mess with the feeling of guilt one ‘suffers’ after personal mummeries. No; the blame must go to the times which have allowed such work as his to be found good (because I gather that as far as the author was concerned these plays are ‘sincere’, ‘his best’, &c—but you see sincere on the same cardboard level as his audience. They are the ones to knock on the head. Eh bien. I am preparing something here to knock them on the head with.
oh dear. Are such letters as this entertaining or edifying for you? One may well ask, —did he go to SPAIN simply to have 3000miles of water between him and the things he polemicizes? We shall get to Spain in a moment.
I also have Dante here (in English, he admitted, cowardly) and find I am just ready for going for the first time through his magnificence. And am attending to many notes & ideas which have somehow lay dead in the hand these past months, feeling alive again. As for study; I am I do believe making some headway into the language; I can hold a passable conversation with the scullery girls or the Lady blonde (ersatz with a vengeance) who also lives in this very proper house and seems to want to go dancing . . . no I was talking about Study wasn’t I. Also reading, with great chains of ignorance, Ortega y Gasset (a contemporary Sp. philosopher, social thinker) and starting a play by Calderon de la Barca, a 17th century Sp. playwright, in Spanish, with the harried dictionary in hand. And so, as for plans. I am more fond of Madrid daily, and shall stay a few weeks more I guess, don’t know; but do have the feeling that, you know, something may happen (the feeling we all have today, heaven knows what the Something is, it never happens; I think this feeling of constant suspension laid in the Christian myth of the Last Judgement which heavy heavy hangs over our heads & imaginary souls). . . anyhow that I want to see Spain more before settling anywhere at anything. And think it may be the perfectly reasonable thing to do to leave most of my luggage with a friend here, buy a 3000kilomtre ticket (about 1800miles I believe) and go about, spend a week in Toledo, in Granada, &c., that ticket I think about 20$. As Walker Evans said when I saw him, —Don’t go over and sit in one place; move around, look at it all. He is right. I still must get papers straightened out, of which more later. [...]