Here are the books and if you do some way go ahead with it now I wish the best success to it, and if you don’t before I beat out the plowshares of my own frustrations we can talk about it in any direction it takes us, and that at your convenience any time except weekends, but a week-day drink? supper at one of those borderline Hungarian bistros?
with best wishes from me and us all,
W G
H G Wells: quoted 28 November 1950.
To Charles Monaghan
[Informed by WG that MacGibbon & Kee agreed to publish R in England, Monaghan warned him of possible negative reactions by the British press and suggested enlisting eminent British writers like Colin Wilson on its side. In the fall of 1961, WG and family had moved from Manhattan to a small town 20 miles north; they were at this address until fall 1967.]
114 North Highland Place
Croton-on-Hudson, N Y
25 January 1962
Dear Charles Monaghan.
Thanks for your letter—and the spirit of the revanche that fills it. Negociations with MacGibbon & Kee are just about completed though I do not know their publishing date, I should think it will be some time in the fall. And my own approach, even here, has been to pull back somewhat and see what developments if any there will be without my intrusion, expecting paperback copies in the stores the last week of February. Asher will of course not pause for proof copies but I would think there will be a usable gap between paper copies here and MacGibbon & Kee’s publication so that O’Keefe can hand round Meridian editions as pre-publication copies there. But my whole inclination right now is to wait to hear O’Keefe’s plan of attack and since as I remember you know him he will probably be the best person to talk to about your ideas. Though from what I’ve seen I thoroughly agree that the social messagenicks are rampant there in England though I believe even more vigourous and apparently high handed than here, here after all they are so largely resentful remnants of the past and relegated wherever there is intelligence and taste as nagging bores, Britain apparently is quite different, a nice cultural lag and like it or not I suppose I’m in the Colin Wilson camp? Jack Green should have before Meridian’s publication an issue of his newspaper 30pp or so attacking the US no-nothing reviews of the book in 1955, which might be fuel for the British fire but again, I’m inclined to wait and see, and similarly to postpone satisfaction on the Bogus F. Warburg score. At any rate unless something else rears before that I’ll let you know of anything above a whisper here come late next month, and send a copy of newspaper immediately I have it.
And yes, Croton is salutary.
very best regards.
W. Gaddis.
To Aaron Asher
[A note on WG’s personalized memo stationery attached to the first installment of Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!]
27 February 1962
Aaron—
Here at last—a la revanche! You might get a rise out of those mentioned, especially the provincials if they thought they were being dignified by attacks in sin capital Greenwich Village, ho! (I gather the Hicks & Highets come later.)
WG.
Highets: Gilbert Highet attacked R in the Book of the Month Club News; Green does indeed deal with him and Granville Hicks in part 2.
To John D. Seelye
[Seelye wrote on 26 April to congratulate WG on the publication of the Meridian R and the piece on WG that appeared in the Saturday Review (April 21, 8–9). He enclosed two clippings: his own essay “Plight of ‘Neglected’ Author,” Berkeley Daily Gazette, 16 February 1962, 11, which mentions WG in passing, and a article by William Hogan entitled “Recognition for ‘The Recognitions’” that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, 26 April 1962, 41.]
Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
21 May 1962
Dear Mr Seelye.
I’ve been so inexcusably poor about writing that at this point it would be graceless even for me to apologise; as graceless as it would be for me to in some way ‘thank’ you for the piece in the Berkeley paper, though I can certainly say of that that it becomes more instead of less refreshing measured against the froth of most of the enclosed, which you may have seen and which you note when it is about the book is only about the book as an object, a Thing, generally the kind of nonsense though which increases sales (if not readership) so I am not carping, much. Irritation though at such as the Dolbier bit of patent phonyness (he’d referred to The Recognitions by William Gibson in a Saturday Review splash 7 years ago), now the ‘12 years . . . 976 pages . . .’ and the rest the sort of blurb writing he evidently hopes will be picked up in advertising, his (name in) bold face on 10,000 dust jackets, though why the antics of these finks continue to annoy me I do not know, I wrote that book once. Still find it revived (the rancour) at yesterday’s brown-nose on Sunday Times Book Review front-page lesson on how a best seller is manufactured (v. the interior $000000 two-page ad for the same Wouk of art, if you’ll pardon the) lesson on how, if that can be seriously flung broadcast as a saga of artist’s life USA then of course The Recognitions must appear sprawling, ‘turbulent, Joycean’, lesson on how to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
Enough of this, it only points up the abyss of which others, composers say, are constantly aware. On the Joyce tack (I may have written you this before) I was distressed at the time of the original publication when Harcourt used the best blurb-quote they had, which proved to be Stuart Gilbert, unfurled across the back of the jacket as a sales pitch but which, as I anticipated, only gave reviewers an escape hatch from which to say ‘. . . Joyce . . . , and I didn’t understand this either’ (ie ‘because it’s like Joyce,’ not ‘because I didn’t read it’), though I recall being jolted to find even the New Yorker (I believe Brendan Gill) taking this recourse, rather more snottily than the others to be sure but riding the comparison even to typography (—instead of “).
But this frankly is the sort of controversy I would wish to keep myself apart from: I remember Robert Graves once writing (‘Letter to the editor’) that he answered critics &c only when they mis-took his facts and that seems to me the only sane approach, otherwise I threaten to become a character in the book which is largely about, after all, the “that is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all . . .” I can say, my Joyce is limited to Dubliners and some of his letters, but that is not the kind of fact I mean; as pointless really as would have been writing to protest Time magazine’s “Mr Pivner, the all-too-common man, is a try at redoing Joyce’s Mr Bloom . . .” with the confidence that it was ‘in fact’ a try at redoing my own experience with my father, transmuted, as seemed permissible, with trivia. “. . . complex, but hardly obscure” as you say, I agree. The overwhelming fact is that there the book is, quite apart from me (cf. top of page 96) and better God knows a battleground for the likes of you and Jack Green than the Dolbiers, amen.
(Though I append this: I met a woman here some months ago you might know of, name of June Oppen Degnan & pub’r of the San Francisco Review 165-28th Avenue, S F 21, who seemed quite impressed by the book (“remarkable, fascinating, important . . .”) and might if you were so inclined be interested in any critical work you did on it for S F Review.)
Otherwise? It’s to be published this fall in England by MacGibbon & Kee, and a refugee from NY bundle of great energy and if I may say allegiance to it named Charles Monaghan is trouncing possible critics reviewers newspapers &c beforehand in hopes of a firework or 2 mounting the mandarins against the liblabs, ho!
No, no short stories or whatnot published elsewhere ever; a novel on business begun and dropped in about ”57; a novel begun, rebuilt into an impossibly long play (very rear guard, Socrates in the US Civil War), shelved 1960; current obsession with expanding prospects of programmed society & automation in the arts which may bring an advance, a commitment, even an escape from the tomb of the 9-to-5.
Since my past delinquency in correspondence has made clear that your interest in and efforts regarding the book aren’t swayed one way or another by the win
ds of my appreciation let me say here they continue blowing wholeheartedly.
Yours,
W Gaddis
the enclosed: presumably the reviews and features that had appeared on the Meridian R up to that time. Most of the material was journalism, not criticism.
Dolbier: Maurice Dolbier (1912–93) wrote a favorable review of the Meridian R for the New York Herald Tribune (14 April 1962, 6), which got a number of facts wrong (as WG points out), as he did when he called the Harcourt R by “William Gibson” in the Saturday Review seven years earlier (“The Summing-up in Books for 1955,” 24 December 1955, 11).
Wouk: on Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke (1962), a novel about a successful writer destroyed by New York.
Stuart Gilbert: Gilbert (1883–1969) is best known for his book on Joyce’s Ulysses. The blurb he wrote for R reads as follows: “[The Recognitions] is a vast and devastating picture of the world the powers-that-be have doomed us to live in; Mr. Eliot’s Waste Land was only a small corner of the wilderness so observantly and successfully explored by Mr. Gaddis. Such a work might easily be lugubrious but the author’s wit, irony, and erudition, combined with a rich diversity of subject matter, make this book fascinating reading; long though it is, even longer than ‘Ulysses,’ the interest, like that of Joyce’s masterpiece and for very similar reasons, is brilliantly maintained throughout.”
Gill: see Gill’s anonymous review in the New Yorker, 9 April 1955, 117.
Graves [...] editor’): probably Graves’s letter beginning “To the Editor of Commentary” published as “Robert Graves Demurs” in Commentary, November 1956, 471–72, in response to an error-filled article published in Commentary’s October 1956 issue by Arnold Sherman entitled “A Talk With Robert Graves: English Poet in Majorca.”
“that is [...] at all”: from Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
letters: Stuart Gilbert’s edition of Joyce’s letters appeared in 1957.
Time magazine: Theodore E. Kalem’s anonymous review of R appeared in Time, 14 March 1955, 112, 114.
my father: shortly after World War II, WG met his father for the first time at the Harvard Club in NYC.
(top of page 96): Wyatt on the artist as “the human shambles that follows” his work around.
San Francisco Review: Seelye and Green corresponded about the possibility of publishing something in the San Francisco Review—specifically having it take over the special issue on WG that Prairie Schooner was to have published—but nothing came of it.
liblabs: “Lib-Labs” are Liberal-Labourers; Monaghan was afraid they would fault R for its mandarin nature, which is why he hoped to enlist mandarin critics in favor of it. The English R received a dozen or so reviews, but no such controversy followed.
To Charles Monaghan
Croton-on-Hudson, NY
1 June 1962
Dear Charles Monaghan.
With the usual promptness an answer of sorts to yours of 10 April, the sorts being these attached which reflect if anything the monumental laziness of the local literary press: not that I should have had profound critiques on every page (which of course I should)(in 1955) but the best they can do (except perhaps for the Berkeley Calif item) seems to be to look over each other’s shoulders and write about the writing about what’s being written about and never, never under pain of firing about the thing itself.
Words from the Grave (‘Palinurus’) might well create a disquieting effect but C Connolly made even then (1947?) such an effort at the self-picture of sloth that I cannot imagine his lifting the book let alone . . . well, brave of you, it could be quite a coup. And, mightn’t liblab damning of the sort you mention give it a leg up? or have they entirely taken over to the exclusion of the happy few (as I recall at the time Aubry Mennon (sp? Prevalence of Witches about 1953) despised it). Between 2 stools sounds altogether possible falling upon, I suppose, if it still exists, the unkempt plot of Colin Wilson. At that, even one of the stools finds itself between 2 others, I mean I would think the social-conscience types might be torn between the book’s contempt for their purpose on the one hand and delight at such criticism of USA (‘anti-America’) as they could find on the other. All together, quite a prospect if such, indeed, it is: if, I mean, they don’t all win quietly by simply looking the other way when the book staggers onto the scene. Shall I re-title it? Oldeblood Hawke? (The NYSunday Times Book Review front page for that appalling item 2 weeks ago subtitled as I recall How Success Spelled Artistic Failure) and, having seen how Failure spelled it (cf. 3rd page single column of spite March 1955 on The Recognitions) one should I suppose turn on to pages 14–15 for the full 2-page spread picture of the author looking balefully over Copies of his wouk of art, a gesture which cost Doubleday $4500 . . . I cannot think things are too terribly different in Fleet st.
I don’t know what of the enclosed I might already have sent you, herewith 2 copies of each one of which might be useful to O’Keeffe. Your campaigning strategy must bring something out of the woodwork there if only malice (what is forthwith dubbed a ‘controversial book’).
thanks, best wishes and luck,
W Gaddis
attached: presumably the press the Meridian R had received up to that time.
C Connolly: Cyril Connolly published a collection of reflections and aphorisms entitled The Unquiet Grave in 1944 under the pseudonym Palinurus. Monaghan sent him a copy of R, with no result.
Aubry Mennon: Aubrey Menen’s witty, Waughvian novel The Prevalence of Witches was published in 1947.
3rd page single column: another reference to Granville Hicks’s review of R, on the verso of the third page (i.e., p. 6).
To Terry Southern
[American novelist and screenwriter (1924–95). With Richard Seaver and Alexander Trocchi he was editing an anthology published as Writers in Revolt (Frederick Fell, 1963), which includes a selection from chapter 3 of R (pp. 78–100, more than WG suggested below).]
Croton-on-Hudson, New York
1 June 1962
Dear Mr. Southern.
Thanks for your interest in The Recognitions and I am sorry to be so long about answering your query regarding parts of it for your anthology. The impressive company of writers involved makes the proportion of my novel which you propose including very flattering, and thus I sincerely hope that it will not disturb your project when I say that a variety of reasons obliges me to limit such a selection to the first section you indicate only, that is, pp 91–100, from “It was dark afternoon . . .” through “. . . the exposure of her back.”
After the debacle of the book’s publication in 1955 I am only getting used now to the idea that some people actually have read it as you’ve done and find that most gratifying, which adds to my hope that my reservations with regard to this project don’t inhibit it, though with the range from Camus to Bill Burroughs to choose from that hardly seems likely. If this makes sense for you would you please make any business arrangements with Miss Candida Donadio at Russell & Volkening?
Yours,
William Gaddis
Bill Burroughs: WG became acquainted with novelist William S. Burroughs (1914–97) in the early fifties and saw him occasionally later in life.
Candida Donadio: WG’s agent in later years; see headnote to 17 April 1973.
To John D. Seelye
[Seelye wrote 20 January 1963 recommending a Bay area resident named Michel Landa as a possible translator for a French edition of R. Seelye also reported on the progress of the Prairie Schooner issue on R and asked after WG’s new work.]
[Croton-on-Hudson, NY]
2 February 1963
Dear Mr Seelye:
Many thanks for your interest in getting The Recognitions into French. Gallimard have been blowing hot and cold on it for some months, appalled at the task involved like anyone (except the Italians who took it on (Mondadori) but with a 30-month publishing period which reflects their anticipating translation as no mere bagatelle; also your last sentence (“. . . the value of all th
e many ambiguities . . .”) reassures me on having turned down Hanser Verlag’s offer to publish it with 350 pages cut (and after what the Germans have put us through this past century in the way of poundage why should they be let off so lightly?)). At any rate I would think the only thing that would intoxicate a French publisher to the grabbing point would be someone coming forward lunatic enough to do it as a love labour which I should certainly not encourage! Thus it would seem if your Michel Landa wanted to write to Gallimard (I’m sorry I do not know whom to address there, he might) saying he understood they’d shown interest in it which—for a decent consideration—he might like to share . . . ? (I gather from his first name French may be a native language to him?)
The phrase ‘welcome issue’ on the Karl Shapiro project I hadn’t heard and am of course most intrigued and curious how it will all turn out. On other matters, there was a film in prospect last spring and summer but I had to hold back for more firm prospects on it than came through and so far as I know it is still largely all prospect, much talk and notes, and possible even now that something may come of it yet. Meanwhile your query on progress on my latest book can draw only an equivocal response since my latest book is suspended (the cobbler’s children go barefoot) while I try to disentangle myself from a commission I welcomed some 7 months ago, a contract to work on a book for the Ford Foundation (not, repeat repeat repeat not a ‘grant’) on the use of television in the schools, an area they have blown some $60 or $70 million in over the past decade and now, quite understandably, wanted a ‘book’ about it, not a report, not a summary, a ‘book’; and I took the offer as a job and of course on getting into it found it an infinitely more involved affair than I, fresh from the boresome tasks of writing speeches &c on the balance of payments problem and direct investment overseas, had at first considered, thinking I suppose to treat it all in those fairly matter-of-fact propagandistic terms. At any rate I’ve material to take in to the Ford folk this week which I don’t know how they’ll feel about but worse I’m not sure how I feel about, I haven’t had a chance to get off and look at it myself and my impression is I may have fallen between two stools, huzzahs for the tonic effect it is having in (public school) teaching interspersed with caveats on technology devouring its own children, all this complicated by constant notes and thoughts and reading on the side on my book started many years ago largely on this same area, technology/democracy/the artist. Well, Ford may simply say “Pay him and get him out of here!” (or of course they may be even more brief, just “Get him out of here!”) when they see what I’ve done and not having really a clear enough picture of it myself I don’t at this moment know which would be more distressing, to have it squelched or published-andbe-damned. And even here is the equivocation, the Luciferian pride of wanting to be damned for one’s self not crucified for others. (I’ll stop this before this metaphor goes any further for the whole situation is really more annoyingly absurd than such images can dignify.) (But you see what a polite question can bring you.)