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This book is projected as essentially a satire on business and money matters as they occur and are handled here in America today; and on the people who handle them; it is also a morality study of a straightforward boy reared in our culture, of a young man with an artist’s conscience, and of the figures who surround them in such a competetive and material economy as ours.
The book just now is provisionally entitled both Sensation and J.R.
William Gaddis
Donn A Pennebaker: American documentary filmmaker (1925– ), perhaps best known for the Bob Dylan tour-film Dont Look Back and Monterey Pop. See his memoir “Remembering Gaddis,” Conjunctions 33 (Fall 1999): 157–60.
Sensation: in R, a young lady is reading “a current novel” entitled Sensation (716); Gaddis explained, “I’d thought that one day I might write a novel with this title & so a little advance billing” (letter to Steven Moore, 12 June 1983).
To David Tudor Pole
143 East 19th street
New York City 3
8 March 1957
Dear David.
This will be brief, since I feel I have such a faint chance of its reaching you; the address I found on a Christmas card of some time past (and all the delights you’ve sent from Portugal &c &c never carry a return, much as they’ve delighted me). But my own habits of correspondence these 2 years past have become so sloppy that I’ve by now lost touch with almost all the better friends of youth, which by now even includes Barney, heaven knows where he may be (though you may too).
WG with his wife Pat and children; left, with Sarah, late 1955; bottom, with Matthew at Massapequa, 1958.
At the moment, sped on by an 18-month-old daughter who has just learned to say the word ‘money’ frighteningly clear, I’m trying to corner a writing job in a vast drug company called Pfizer International. And working out my very spotty resume, I included, somewhat embellished, the documentary film on the background of fine-paper making, which I worked on in North Africa for a Mr D*v*d T*d*r P*le . . . Of course you may never hear from them (I gave them this address), for they seem somewhat skittish about actually hiring writers; but if they should reach you inquiring querulously into my past triumphs, would you be kind enough to forward them a very professional-sounding note on that Great Film? Oh, what a chore this is to ask of anyone, I know. But things do look like they may be moving toward some settling eventuality around here and it is high time.
Even if you incline to pass off the above favour with a sharp note to this company saying “ . . . wholly . . . unreliable . . .” do let me hear from you on any account, and this for John Napper too, or even his address, —and if he is in sight of course, Barney, but let me know of you, married, but with family? or in Greece? Espain? even Inglen?
with every good wish
William Gaddis
Pfizer International: founded in 1849, and today the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. When WG worked there (1957–62), its main office was located in Brooklyn, but he worked at its Manhattan office. The company Thomas Eigen works for in J R is based on Pfizer.
To Pat Gaddis
[While his wife and daughter were staying with friends, WG moved the family’s things from their former apartment to one at 82nd St., near Third Avenue. Thereafter—as Eigen and Gibbs do in J R—WG and a Harvard friend named Douglas Wood (1922?–66) split the rent on the 96th St. apartment for work and storage purposes.]
New York City
14 March 1957
Dear Ladies,
Things happen every minute, I believe actually pointing in a direction. I went this noon up to the office of Mr Giaimo, with Douglas, and got all that straightened out (with D reassuring Mr G he wasn’t just going to use 96th st to bring girls up and have parties), and am even to get the $42 deposit back. I told Douglas to apply it toward the loan, he protested, and I thought we’ll see when the moment comes how badly it’s needed where. He asked me up there again this evening to watch something on Playhouse 90, but I think I’ll do better to go home and try to straighten things out there. [...]
all love,
W.
Playhouse 90: a TV series featuring 90-minute plays. Wood worked in television, most notably on the acclaimed documentary series Victory at Sea (1952–53).
To Keith Botsford
[American-European writer, teacher, and television producer (1928– ) whom Gaddis had known for several years. He approached Botsford in 1957 with an idea for doing a program about forgery for the short-lived series The Seven Lively Arts (CBS). The Keith Botsford Papers at the Beinecke Library contains Gaddis’s three-page proposal and three additional pages of notes. Botsford responded in a letter dated 8 May 1957 to say he didn’t think the proposal was viable, largely because of “the visual problem” WG mentions below. Botsford’s reply implies Gaddis proposed this idea largely as a way to earn enough money to quit his job and write another novel.]
201 East 82nd street,
New York City 28
10 April 1957
Dear Keith:
I thought at some length about the program possibility we talked of a week or so ago. The visual problem persists, though it could I think eventually be worked out. What I enclose here is no desperate alternative, but an idea which is simply a better one, more tangible, more topical, more visual, one which I’ve spent years reading on and thinking about, as The Recognitions might show. I’m not proposing an adaptation of that book, incidentally, except to develop by exposition some of the ideas which it investigated in fiction.
The compelling thing about a program on forgery I think is the chance it offers to approach the arts with a light touch, without the self-conscious overseriousness and frequent condescension that is such a threat to ‘cultural’ programs. Once the unifying problem is established, the material is highly varied and practically inexhaustible, as I’m afraid the enclosed notes scarcely show. The chance for guests from among the critics, experts, and entrepreneurs, is almost alarmingly good. Let me know if there’s anything here you want to see extended, developed &c.
Yours,
Willie
To Charles Monaghan
[A journalist, historian, and tireless advocate of R, as later letters will show. Born in 1932, he was working in New York University’s Office of Information Services at the time.]
193 Second Avenue
New York City 3
16 May 1960
Dear Mr. Monaghan:
I appreciate your taking the trouble to send the mention in your Commonweal review. Even the dribs and drabs are gratifying and I wish often enough that they could be assembled somewhere loudly. You are right enough, the Hicks-Geismar combination was a pain, Geismar could be dismissed but I’ve never quite been able to accept the meanness (in the several senses of that word) of the Hicks. Thank you again.
W. Gaddis
Commonweal: reviewing Richard Stern’s novel Golk, Monaghan cited R among “some of the finest writing of recent times” (Commonweal, 13 May 1960, 190).
Hicks-Geismar: Granville Hicks reviewed R in the New York Times Book Review (13 March 1955, 6), Maxwell Geismar in the Saturday Review (12 March 1955, 23).
To John D. Seelye
[American critic (1931– ) and a professor in the English Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He mentioned WG in passing in a piece published in the Berkeley Gazette in 1962 and the following year wrote an essay for the special issue of Prairie Schooner that its editor Karl Shapiro planned to devote to R. That issue never materialized, but Seelye’s essay was eventually published in In Recognition of William Gaddis (1984).]
New York City 3
25 November 1960
dear Mr. Seelye.
I greatly appreciate your letter and your comments on The Recognitions. Though such fine anecdotes as the Southern Pacific story always make me wonder how much damage the book has done.
What I most appreciate of course are your efforts proselyting for the book. I hear enough from different places to con
vince me that there is a real underground which may burst out and be heard any day. In this regard you might be interested in the efforts of someone here in New York named Jack Green who writes, duplicates and mails out his own publication newspaper, 3 or 4 current issues of it devoted to The Recognitions (Box 114, New York 12, N.Y.—$1. covers the cost of these issues I believe). And frankly I have better hopes of the success of such efforts as yours and his than all the Esquire symposia in sight—the point being really that you have read the book.
Even I of course begin to talk of it as an object, a commodity, since I am now trying to encourage someone here to bring it out in paperback and, hope against hope, finally English publication—though you might guess how such people are alarmed at costs. And then if there were some competent madman to translate it into French as a labour-of-love—
I am flattered by your final request concerning the manuscript but for no reason I can name feel no inclination to part with it. I should add though that it has been stored in an old Corn Flakes carton in a barn on Long Island, and your letter prompts me to go out and get it to a more secure place.
Yours,
William Gaddis
Jack Green: the pseudonym of Christopher Carlisle Reid (1928?– ), who published seventeen issues of newspaper in 1957–1965. Issue #11 (3 June 1961) was a thirty-two page “Quote-Précis of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions,” and issues #12–14, entitled “fire the bastards!,” appeared in February, August, and November of 1962. See my introduction to the book version (Dalkey Archive Press, 1992) for further details.
translate it into French: All three of these hopes were fulfilled: a paperback was published in early 1962, English publication followed that autumn, and a French translation (by Jean Lambert) appeared in 1973.
To Tom Jenkins
[A journalist who wrote about detective novels; his friend David Markson (see headnote to 28 February 1961) recommended that he read R.]
New York City
30 December 1960
dear Mr. Jenkins.
I appreciate your writing me about The Recognitions. I had got your earlier letter (forwarded by Harcourt) but simply had not managed to answer it.
Ch. Rolo was one reviewer I felt at the time who had seriously tried to behave in a responsible way: first, he read the book (which proved more rare among reviewers than I had anticipated). And the summary statement of his which you quote is probably quite accurate as far as it goes; however it does stop short of Wyatt’s lines on page 898–9—and the revelation “love and do what you will”. This however does inevitably bring up the problem of grace, which I felt uncertain about then and I believe my uncertainty shows. (I am more uncertain about it now, more dubious.) What might be appended to Rolo’s statement too is the fact of the inescapableness of forgery as a part of the finite condition—if you will allow forgery to include necessarily imperfect representations of eventually inexpressible absolutes (in Plato’s sense of the ‘ideals’), but that this is the best we have, the best we can do: what is vital is the faith that the absolute—the ‘perfect’, etc.—does exist (thus Wyatt’s “Thank God there was the gold to forge”—top of page 689), gold=perfection=absolute=love, in an alchemical scheme where Brown=matter (to be redeemed), Valentine=mind, Wyatt=creative spirit without love, Esme=love. That is a fragment of one undercurrent of interpretation, at any rate.
You might be interested in the project of someone here in New York who has spent the past year or so on the book (without any assist from me) and who is currently doing some pieces on it in a publication which he writes, duplicates & mails out himself. He is: Jack Green / newspaper / box 114 / New York 12 / NY. And I think he will send you the 4 issues as they come out if you send him $1.
As for time spent writing the book, it went on over 7 years, 1 or 2 of which were entirely fallow, 2 of which were on the other hand dawn-till-night periods of quite isolated, I might even say obsessed intensity. I can’t say how much research I did for the book; most of it was specific or started out being so and then of course led on to other possibilities and insights. Certainly I did not sit down, envision, and write the book simply drawing on (what reviewers insisted upon calling) “vast erudition”, though what pained me most about the reviewers was their refusal—their fear—to relax somewhat with the book and be entertained.
Yours,
William Gaddis
ps. My only work recently has been on a play which in present draft is too long & complicated.
Ch. Rolo: Charles J. Rolo (1916–82) reviewed R in the Atlantic Monthly (April 1955, 80–81). Jenkins had quoted his belief that “Wyatt has arrived at a doctrine somewhat akin to Gide’s—a doctrine which holds that salvation lies in scraping away the consolatory deceits and secondhand values of the counterfeit personality and in obeying the promptings of the real self, the soul, in the full awareness that man is ‘born into sin’ and that sin must be ‘lived through’: all efforts to escape from the burden of imperfection are a denial of humanity and therefore lead to spiritual and emotional forgery.”
“love and do what you will”: St. Augustine’s advice, from On the First Letter of John.
a play: Once at Antietam, portions of which were eventually published in FHO.
To Rust Hills
[Hills (1924–2008) was soon to become fiction editor for Esquire, a post he would occupy on and off for the next thirty years.]
New York City
15 February 1961
Dear Rust Hills.
Thanks for your note on the Houghton-Mifflin award, is it? There were I’m afraid no entry blanks enclosed. But I do know a “good new writer” I’d be glad to recommend if you want to send the blanks along.
The Civil War chapter has become a full-in fact over-length play and I am involved in cutting it now. But lunch of course is more than welcome, any time you choose.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
Civil War chapter: after R, WG had begun a novel on the Civil War that he later converted into the play Once at Antietam.
To Tom Jenkins
New York 3
16 February 1961
Dear Tom Jenkins.
Thanks for your letters, especially the material on/by/about David Markson, a persistently guilty area of mine where I may now expiate if you will be good enough to send me his Mexico address. I was highly entertained by the Comp. Lit. piece discovered in the typewriter in Epitaph for a Tramp, had to go back to find the context and thence, whetted, from start to finish, probably the first ‘cop story’ I’ve read and had a fine time with it, envying Markson the character who wound it up, the musician type whose exacting dialogue impressed upon me how refined all that has become since I struggled with Anselm and the Viareggio crowd 8 and 9 years ago, it seems half a century.
And of course I am most intrigued by the Malcolm Lowry references, I was in Mexico when his book came out, read part of it, the copy disappeared, I got another when I came back but I regret haven’t (yet) returned to it. Even that initial brush was a good 14 years ago; and once I got involved with The Recognitions a year or so later read little or no fiction, a habit I haven’t entirely broken since.
And finally, for Chas. Rolo . . . he’s not stupid but quite gone on what’s fashionable, what fits, as people who make their livings that way have to be. It often seems to me the driving quality of those people, reviewers, publishers &c, is curiosity, little more. And in their attempt to turn the creative arts into performing ones (the current measure of success) are hungry for us, for writers, to share (dignify) their values. I suppose it’s never been any different though, we must carry them on our backs, the editors, anthologizers, like the hounds they are running for their lunch, while the writer of any substance like the fox is running for his life.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
Epitaph for a Tramp: first published in 1959; early in the novel, the detective protagonist is in a student’s apartment and reads in the typewriter the conclusion to an essay: “And thus it
is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007, 32).
Malcolm Lowry: Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) has some similarities to R.
To David Markson
[David Markson (1927–2010), later to become an esteemed novelist, had written a Master’s thesis on Malcolm Lowry in 1951 and had begun writing fiction by 1955. He read R twice when it first came out and wrote to WG in June of 1955 to express his admiration, but received no answer until this letter of 1961, at which time Markson was living in Mexico. He and WG would continue to correspond, and occasionally see each other, until WG’s death.]
New York City
28 February 1961
Dear David Markson.
After lo these many (six) years—or these many low (sick) years—if I can presume to answer yours dated 11 June ’55: I could evade embarrassment by saying that it had indeed been misdirected to Dr Weisgall and reached me only now, but I’m afraid you know us both too well. In fact I was in low enough state for a good while after the book came out that I could not find it in me to answer letters that said anything, only those (to quote yours again) that offered ‘I just loved your gorgeous book and I think Mithra is so charming. . .’. Partly appalled at what I counted then the book’s apparent failure, partly wearied at the prospect of contention, advice and criticism, and partly just drained of any more supporting arguments, as honestly embarrassed at high praise as resentful of patronising censure. And I must say, things (people) don’t change, just get more so; and I think there is still the mixture, waiting to greet such continuing interest as yours, of vain gratification and fear of being found out, still ridden with the notion of the people as a fatuous jury (counting reviewers as people), publishers the police station house (where if as I trust you must have some experience of being brought in, you know what I mean by their dulled but flattering indifference to your precious crime: they see them every day), and finally the perfect book as, inevitably, the perfect crime (the point of this last phrase being, for some reason which insists further development of this rambling metaphor, that the criminal is never caught). So, as you may see by the letterhead on the backside here, I am hung up with an operation of international piracy that deals in drugs, writing speeches on the balance of payments deficit but mostly staring out the window, serving the goal that Basil Valentine damned in ‘the people, whose idea of necessity is paying the gas bill’ . . . (A little frightening how easily it all comes back.) But sustained by the secret awareness that the secret police, Jack Green and yourself and some others, may expose it all yet.