with very best regards. I hope my next can be somewhat more coherent,
W. Gaddis
Mondadori: Vincenzo Mantovani’s translation Le perizie was published by Mondadori in 1967.
To John D. Seelye
Croton-on-Hudson, New York
10 May 1963
Dear Mr Seelye.
I recalled recently having written you some time past and noting, in response to my ‘next book’ as an item of interest to you, that it would be a report on school television for the Ford Foundation; and as little moment as it is I am obliged and I must confess relieved to say that the project fell through after time work travel wasted and a little money changed hands, all too predictable, so—I’ve escaped back to my own ‘next book’ though how long it will be (in the writing I mean, not the length) heaven knows.
Indirectly word reached me of an announcement in Prairie Schooner for the issue in question this summer? And further developments, if this can be called so, include $2500 handed me nicely outright and unsolicited later this month by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, what ever possessed them?
Yours,
William Gaddis
National Institute of Arts and Letters: the award was presented by Malcolm Cowley on 22 May; the citation reads: “To WILLIAM GADDIS, novelist, born in New York City, whose novel Recognitions exhibits breadth and subtlety of imagination, a sense of fictional architecture with a remarkable effectiveness in the rendering of details, and unflagging stylistic verve.” ($2,500 = $19,000 today.)
To David Markson
Croton-on-Hudson, New York
9 June 1963
Dear Dave.
Many thanks for the ‘Observer’ clip, which frankly I would find more of a comfort if I were not trying to do it all again —include & order everything —as appears to be happening, that or end up like the Collier brothers. Our summer is quite unplanned but mine will certainly include some stumbling against yr doorbell.
Yours,
W Gaddis.
‘Observer’ clip: Philip Toynbee’s favorable review of the English R in the Observer Weekend Review, 9 September 1962.
Collier brothers: Langley and Homer Collyer made news in 1947 when the two elderly men were found dead in a house in Harlem cluttered with 120 tons of junk. It took eighteen days just to find the bodies.
To Jack P. Dalton
[An American Joyce critic (d. 1981) who, assuming WG was influenced by Joyce, invited him to contribute an essay to a book on the Irish writer, eventually published as Twelve and a Tilly (1965). The “[sic]” in the final sentence is WG’s.]
27 September 1963
dear Mr Dalton.
I regret I cannot oblige on your request which I found as flattering as I did the original reviews frustrating in their generally invidious comparisons between The Recognitions and the work of Joyce, not then having read any more of him than Exiles, the Dubliners stories, about 40 pages of Ulysses & 10 of Finnegans Wake, and still unconvinced of the osmosis theory of literary influence in which the reviewers take refuge, but sorry nontheless [sic] to be no more help to you here beyond wishing you luck with your project.
Yours,
William Gaddis
To Pat Gaddis
[WG went to Germany in the summer of 1964 to assist the U.S. Army with a film entitled The Battle at St. Vith on the loss of the Belgian town during the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944), as does Thomas Eigen in J R. See Gibbs’s outraged description of the battle on pp. 390–92, where St. Vith is called Saint Fiacre. The documentary was written and directed by Michael J. Laurence and produced by Hunter Low, both mentioned below.] dear Pat—I’ve just got your letter of 7 July—through all the routine delays of “military channels”—someone must write the satire on the peacetime occupying army of Europe, a vast floating welfare state & good explanation of how Eisenhowers are manufactured. [...]
Munich, Germany
12–14 July 1964
WG with director Michael J. Laurence and film crew in Germany, 1964.
I cannot say things here have been going awfully well, due largely to poor preparation from New York end—I should have been over here a month before I was—certainly H. Low’s letters to the people to be interviewed should have gone out far before they did, to allow for answers before I left. But even that is minor in comparison to the problems over the massive archaic studio equipment we are saddled with, constant breakdowns of one thing or another, needed parts never sent, all this working extreme frustration on director and crew—and eventually on subjects being interviewed and me. Much strong feeling, especially on Mike Laurence’s part (and I don’t blame him a bit since he does work hard & long) of being a projection of Hunter Low fantasy, resentment over lack of support from New York—Lord! what a thing this army is.
We had lunch on Saturday, for instance, at 5 pm—having had old Gen. Blumentritt taped to a bench (microphone cable) but in hotel “garden” where it was cold, light failed, police came in to say people were calling to complain about our generator noise in the street & 1 woman having a nervous breakdown, the general’s hands getting progressively more trembling—ended grandly when our truck knocked some glass out of the hotel marquee—all out of E. Waugh. Yesterday the most difficult to date, we finally ended up doing sound interview in depths of a German forest at 10 pm—got back & no place to eat—and just about all of this due to equipment problems.
The biggest disappointment so far—and most interesting tangle—was call to me from Washington cancelling completion of the Skorzeny filming—I was supposed to be there (Madrid) today, but the State Department got word of it, forced its cancellation & forbids my further contact with him. I’m sure I haven’t heard the last of it.
General Bayerlein is mad as a hatter—& we’d got all our equipment to Wurzburg, after talking twice to him on the phone & no reason to believe he’d say no—arrived at his carpet shop & he said he must have time to “prepare”, we are going to try again with him later—I’ve never seen a man with a face the color of red of his—
We are supposed to go to Belgium this week—had planned to leave today (Tuesday) but equipment problems must be solved or everyone will mutiny. This time I would hope to get off ahead of others to look for locations there, since so much time has been wasted over that.
Darling I am so concerned over your vacation, whether you may have gott off even now & may not get this letter which I’ve tried for the last 4 days to write but things have been so hectic—page 1 of this letter written Sunday, page 2 Monday morning and now Tuesday 11 pm in bed I shall finish it some way [...]
Yesterday we finished, if you can imagine, about 10 pm in star light making a sound recording only—other equipment problems having delayed things till it was too late to film—deep in a German forest, an account by Manfred Gregor of being in the German army at age 16 (he wrote of it in a novel The Bridge, look for it in paperback) and now I understand even the recording is unsatisfactory! And Gregor won’t repeat, I don’t blame him. So much of the whole thing quite, quite unbelievable (I mean our experience, what you saw at Sands Point multiplied in awkwardness 100 times)—
3 of us did take time to go to Dachau—but such a memorial has been made of it that it is impossible to connect the place with what happened there.
The plan at the moment is that I shall leave tomorrow with 1 camerman, ahead of crew & director, for St Vith & Bastogne, Belgium, & only hope they arrive later with proper repaired & replaced equipment. We are sending a man to Heidelberg for mail which I should have end of week. I am concerned about you having a decent summer and the children a good one, and concerned about your health. I want you so well & happy, Statue of Liberty trip sounds as grueling as our[s] yesterday here. Finally I cannot believe that by the time you get this Goldwater may be Rep. candidate for president, appalling.
Pictures for children, and my love
W.
Eisenhowers: like Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), American general and president
from 1953 to 1961.
Gen Blumentritt: Günther Blumentritt (1892–1967), German general, responsible for much of the planning to defend France against the Allied invasion.
Skorzeny: Otto Skorzeny (1908–75), a lieutenant colonel in the German Waffen-SS. His English-speaking troops participated in the Battle of the Bulge by infiltrating Allied lines and impersonating American soldiers. After the war he moved to Spain and started an engineering business.
General Bayerlein: Fritz Bayerlein (1899–1970), German panzer general who served under General Hasso von Manteuffel (Blaufinger in J R) in the Ardennes Offensive.
Manfred Gregor [...] The Bridge: pseudonym of Gregor Dorfmeister (1929– ); his autobiographical novel Die Brücke was published in 1958.
Dachau: the first Nazi concentration camp, located in southern Germany.
Goldwater: ultra-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater (1909–98) was indeed nominated by his party to run against Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election.
To John D. Seelye
Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
21 August 1964
Dear Mr Seelye.
I carried your note of 16 May all over southern Germany on a 58-day job which I hoped would give me some chance to answer it but never managed, and return to find yours of 16 June. I had—through Jack Green, I believe—seen a copy of the San Francisco publication which I must confess I found highly entertaining, the kind of mad ingenuity that I would never dream of ‘setting right’ by ‘facts’. (I’ve also in recent months seen copies of 2 academic papers which trace my sources in such convincing detail to Nightwood and particularly Ulysses that my intervention would seem as irrelevant and presumptuous as would my angry responses have been to the original reviewers.)
The Recognitions goes slowly in England, is scheduled in Italy Germany & France, and I have no knowledge of the Nebraska situation. Regarding your query on the material cut from the original MS of the book, it is I would gather in one of a few cardboard cartons filled with notes, MS &c.; as I recall, I did the original cutting in one of the first rewrites (though this is imprecise since some parts were rewritten a number of times, some scarcely at all), the next following a list of suggestions (but not demands) from an editor, the final and most thorough (as, a dropped prefatory chapter) myself for reasons I felt convincing and would probably find even more convincing now. I appreciate the invitation of your friend Mr van Strum but have no wish at this point to see any of that material published.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
the San Francisco publication: Tom “Tiger Tim” Hawkins’s Eve: The Common Muse of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durell (San Francisco: Ahab Press, 1963), a portion of which touches on R and Green’s Fire the Bastards! (pp. 14–18). Hawkins suspected Gaddis and Green were the same person. For more on Hawkins, see chap. 5 of Don Foster’s Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (Henry Holt, 2000).
2 academic papers: the essay on Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), later described as a Master’s thesis, is unidentified; the one on Ulysses was probably a draft of Bernard Benstock’s “On William Gaddis: In Recognition of James Joyce,” Contemporary Literature 6 (1965): 177-89.
Italy Germany & France: only the Italian translation was published; the others fell through (though French and German translations did appear many years later).
the Nebraska situation: Prairie Schooner was (and still is) published by the University of Nebraska; the issue was abandoned in the summer of 1963, though apparently no one informed WG of this.
Mr van Strum: Stevens Van Strum is described in Seelye’s letters to WG as a young friend of his, a classics scholar living in Berkeley, who was “very interested in the book, and has turned up some fascinating things.” He cofounded Oyez Press in 1964.
To John R. Kuehl
[A professor of literature (1928–98) at Princeton and later at New York University, where he directed the first doctoral dissertation on R. He invited WG to contribute to a book in which authors furnished rough drafts of their published work and commented on the process of revision. The book was published (without a contribution by WG) as Write & Rewrite (1967).]
Croton-on-Hudson, New York
29 August 1964
Dear Professor Kuehl.
Thank you for your letter and your interest in The Recognitions in terms of your own project. I am sorry to be so long about answering you but I have been on a two-month job outside the country and am only now beginning to catch up.
Regarding your query, I doubt I could be much help to you even with the most willing spirit and all the necessary time. While I have boxes of redrafted writing and scraps of notes from that novel—parts of which were considerably rewritten, parts very little—I have neither looked at them nor in fact read the book for so many years that I scarcely think I could put my finger on any sequence and follow it through with much faithfulness to the process as it actually occurred, and your approach seems interesting enough that its real success (I don’t mean sales) must depend upon the exactitude with which these tangible aspects can be reproduced, in order to give some measure of those which cannot.
Though I weep for order I live still in a world of scrawled notes on the backs of envelops; and while I realise that you can no more wait upon my good intentions than any publisher will, without evidence, back yours, if I should have the time and luck to turn up anything that makes sense I shall let you know.
Yours,
William Gaddis
To Pat Gaddis
The Lawtonian Hotel
Lawton, Oklahoma
21 Nov. 1964
Pat. A new project started yesterday and the earlier part completed today though rewriting difficult in present state, roughly a day behind schedule—I know this doesn’t interest you (“my work”) but does bear on my hope to clear things up by Wednesday night next. I called my mother eve. of 19th to wish her happy birthday which she had had, and congratulate her on pulling off these 40 years. She said you’d called, told her about new house (she didn’t say what) and new job, on which you would hardly hear my congratulations since you know I’d wish it were for yourself, how good that wd be, instead of as the means of escape that finally got you to it. But there—people compare my work to Joyce, when all that’s really comparable is the bourgeois level of our domestic ambitions aspirations.
Love to the children
W.
To Lyndon B. Johnson
[A Western Union telegram. Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright opposed President Johnson’s plans to expand American involvement in the Vietnam War.]
Croton-on-Hudson, NY
17 June 1965
PRESIDENT JOHNSON
RESPECTFULLY BUT VEHEMENTLY URGE REALISTIC
FULBRIGHT ALTERNATIVE TO PRESENT FUTILE MILITARY
COURSE IN VIET NAM
WILLIAM GADDIS
To Arthur Heiserman
[American literary critic (1929–75) and a professor at the University of Chicago. Heiserman wrote to WG on 19 August, and responded to the letter below (which lacks a closing signature) on 29 September.]
Croton-on-Hudson, NY
[September 1965]
Dear Mr Heiserman.
My being so long about answering your invitation to appear is a fact of such simple rudeness that I can at this point only apologise, since my reasons for putting it off all this time have been real only to me and so scarcely mitigating. If this invitation still holds, in the shadow of the above and what follows and your own obvious need to work out a schedule, I should like to accept it, if not I shall certainly understand.
I have in fact turned down other such invitations, and the variety of my reasons for doing so becomes at this moment all I can think of as material for an acceptance, ranging from prejudice against what seems to me our current tendency to transform the so-called creative artist into a performer, to my own total inexperience of any sort of public appearance and saturation of self-doubts in —What have I to tell them? to teach them? outs
ide the book I have written and those I am writing now? until the doubts themselves are almost all that remains undoubted and so, logically extend even to not accepting.
Should all of this seem to you gratuitous over-complicating (“A simple yes or no answer will do”), I risk that further in my awareness that I must sound all too preciously retiring in the face of your familiarity with these activities, much in the way I’ve thought publication of a first novel at the hands of the book reviewers is like the first time one is hauled into a police station on what for the desk sergeant is an old and tiresome story but for the novel offender a unique audacity (if you will excuse my parlaying the metaphor and be assured that the inclusion in it of book reviewers is not meant to be invidiuous). But I am neither arrested often nor as mad as the above might indicate, nor with work of my own I should wish to try to read at this point in its progress, though I would hope to rescue from that some thesis, possibly chaos, that might be of interest to you.