Piermont, NY
23 July 1970
Dear Mr Bradley.
Following Dr Gerald Freund’s departure for Yale, I understood I might write you concerning the Rockefeller Foundation grant given me over this past year through Vassar College, for the purpose of freeing me to work toward the completion of a work of fiction.
To that end, the grant has accomplished its purpose in a way for which I am eternally grateful, and as its term ends a word of report must be in order. Through the grant, I have been enabled to drop all time-consuming free lance work to concentrate on this book which now, though still short of completion, has 300-odd pages in finished draft, and further portions worked out in the sort of detailed outline I seem to find necessary to write. A passage of some 60 pages of the novel is scheduled for publication in a new review being brought out by E.P.Dutton this fall.
At this stage, considering the liberal nature of the grant and the manner in which it was given, and my uncertainty regarding the general policies and current concerns of the Rockefeller Foundation in this area, it may sound unusual and even impertinent to inquire here about the possibility of requesting an extension of the grant for a further six months’ work on this book. As the hopeful estimate for completing it in the 12-month period of my original grant request was my own, so has been the failure to fulfill it; but I would not want this inquiry to imply that I think the book’s completion will be impossible without a grant extension. Enough of it is now written, and otherwise appears clearly in hand, that I feel reassured about finishing it, though this would take longer with a full return to outside commitments. The only such acceptance I have made is one to give a 2-hour weekly writing class at City College of New York for the fall term (about $2300.), which should allow me almost as much time for this book as I have at present.
If extending the present grant for another six months should be feasible it would be put to as good use and as greatly appreciated as that already received, but I hasten to add that its absence would in no way diminish what I have already been enabled to accomplish, or my lasting gratitude for such an expression of confidence in my efforts.
Yours,
William Gaddis
60 pages [...] in a new review: “J. R. or the Boy Inside,” Dutton Review 1 (1970): 5–68 (an early version of the first forty-four pages of J R).
$2300: about $13,000 today.
To Matthew Gaddis
[WG’s son (1958– ), then living with his mother and sister near Boston.]
Piermont, NY
17 Sept. 70
Dear Matthew.
Well, I got through my first day of school! And at last I have done something I never quite had the nerve to do, walked into a classroom with about 15 people simply sitting, waiting; got behind my desk, hung up my umbrella, sat down facing them, and . . . started to talk. I guess they were surprised to hear me start off by telling them I was there to try to teach something that I didn’t really believe could be taught, writing fiction. And then go on about some examples of good fiction and bad fiction, and everyone sitting there just looking at me. Silence. Start talking again. Finally I asked a couple of questions and got a couple of them talking, and certainly it will all be easier as I go on, next week and the week after, and when I see some of their work. They are college juniors and seniors, and it is different than teaching at Connecticut was because there I saw each person separately, and didn’t sit up in front like The Authority. Even though right now it is a little nerve-wracking, it is good experience for me. Mainly I hope I can be some help to some of them with their early efforts at trying to write, though the only point I’ve pressed on them so far is that the first important and often difficult thing about it is simply sitting down and doing it.
Even for me. Here I am in what is just about perfect, after that upstairs bedroom, —this garage room is so big and light, books on shelves, long table spread out and clear of everything but work, clock, calendar, pencils, typewriter, and such a neat room to pace up and down in even though here and there you do almost fall through the soft spots in the floor under the rug. So my main problem is trying to get used to how neat it is to have this big orderly room of my own and get down to work again, and I’m slowly managing that.
Speaking of work, I had a call yesterday from good old Hunter Low, with a speech for the president of Eastman Kodak they want me to write, and it seemed like a good idea to take it for a lot of reasons so next week I’ll spend a couple of days in Rochester. Sometimes a piece of routine work like that with a deadline is a good thing (also they pay me) so I’m glad it came along right now. [...]
with much love again
Papa
To Sarah Gaddis
[Enclosed with a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s posthumously published miscellany The Crack-Up (New Directions, 1945).]
Piermont NY
17 Sept 70
Dear Sarah.
Here is a book I’ve meant to get you a look at since you talked of keeping a sort of notebook journal. Obviously it’s not for you to sit down and read straight through but I thought you would be interested in what one writer turned the idea into and continue and expand your own along the lines of catching ideas, impressions, thoughts, images, words and combinations of words and overheard remarks and stories and anecdotes at that instant you encounter them, which is so often one you can never recreate purely from memory and may in fact lose forever. Of course in this case, assuming Fitzgerald never expected these notes to be published, I think you find a lot of material which he would have reconsidered and thrown out and never wanted published; but at least, having written them down, he gave himself that choice, rather than putting himself through those long moments of trying to remember —What was it? that remark I heard yesterday, that idea I had last night . . . What is it that makes end of summer at Fire Island unlike anywhere else, and yet like a concentration of the whole idea of summer’s end everywhere . . . [...]
See you soon, much love, write!
Papa
To Jean Lambert
[The French translator of R, which was published in two volumes as Les Reconnaissances by Gallimard in 1973. This letter was reproduced in facsimile in a special issue of the French journal Profils américaines devoted to Gaddis (no. 6, autumn 1994, 5). In the same issue, Lambert has an essay entitled “Notes du traducteur de The Recognitions” (63–71). At the time of this letter, Lambert was at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.]
Piermont, New York 10968
10 February 1971
Dear Mr Lambert.
You may imagine how pleased I was to have your letter with news that the French translation of The Recognitions has been completed; it is so long since I signed the agreement with Gallimard that I had almost given up hope and had, of course, no idea that you or anyone in this country were working on it. (I last heard from the German publisher, incidentally, that they were making a third attempt at a translation.)
All this makes me realize not only what a difficult task it has presented, but my good fortune in the care you have given it, since clearly any success the book may have in France will be so largely due to your efforts. And of course I would like to see your translation and to be of any help I can. I must add however that I am not (as some reviewers seemed to think) fluent in the various languages that appear here and there in the book, including the fragments of French; but I might of course be of some help in explaining my use of an English word or phrase that has caused difficulty so that its translation may be more exact. (I think I was of some help to the Italian translator in this way.) And I am of course extremely curious as to how you have translated the title.
At any rate it would give me immense pleasure simply to see the translation and to meet you. However, I expect to leave in a day or two and to be away until around the end of March, and I don’t want to delay or inconvenience you and any schedule you may have with the publisher. And so you might let me know if it would be convenient for me to drive up sometime earl
y in April to meet you and talk about it all, as I should very much like to do.
Since I can not thank you enough for the work you have done for my novel, let me thank you at least for your letter, and I hope we may meet in April.
Yours,
William Gaddis
Judith and WG in a scene from Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess, filmed in spring 1972 in Croton-on-Hudson.
To Jeanne G. Howes
[A student at Case Western Reserve University who was writing a thesis on R. She mailed her letter on 27 December 1971.]
Piermont NY 10968
8 March 1972
Dear Miss Howes.
I apologise for being so long with an answer to your very kind and gratifying letter, in fact I look now at its date and am even more apologetic than I began.
And so I wish I could respond more satisfactorily than you will find this. First all I have published beyond The Recognitions is the opening passage (about 60 pages) of the novel I am wringing head and hands over now trying to finish before summer. The title is J.R. and the passage appeared in something called Dutton Review (No. 1) about a year or year and a half ago. I gather its distribution wasn’t awfully impressive but even should you come across a copy you would probably find it a good deal different to the first book.
Otherwise I think you are right, there hasn’t been a great deal written about the book though there may be some bibliography in a piece under my name in Contemporary Authors (Gale) vols. 19–20 (c. 1968). I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which The Recognitions’ debt to Ulysses was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses but that was a problem that seemed to dog the book from the start largely, I suppose, from a blurb on the back making the comparison on which most reviewers seized with glee in finding my book wanting. A young man named Koenig did last year write his doctoral thesis on it at New York University but I would imagine it being available only there and, of course, it is his interpretation as yours must be yours.
Otherwise I scarcely know what to say to your request for help on ‘more background’ first, I think, and I am not being facetious when I plead not that it’s so long since I wrote it but that [following a strikeover] (I’ve been typing all day and getting a little bleary) so long since I read it. If I named a single influence it would certainly be TS Eliot who still takes my breath away as he did then (and as a fair number of his lines sprinkled through the book might attest). Regarding any ‘message’, perhaps that art abides and the artist is its tool and victim but despite that it is the only enterprise worth embracing in the attempt to justify life; that art executed without love is bad (false) art but such love is not easy to come by. There was a corollary there too with God (perfection, gold) and the driving impossibility of grasping it because of our finite condition but that attempt being all we have to justify this finite condition (page 689 at the top I suppose is the key to the book if there is such). And in taking it down just now to look for this reference I read a few pages at random and must confess found them quite entertaining. I suppose if there has been one immense frustration with the book’s often grudging acceptance it has been how few people seemed able to permit themselves, despite its so-called ‘erudition’, to simply enjoy it.
Thank you again for your interest and your good letter and I wish I could have been more help.
Yours,
William Gaddis
Wisconsin quarterly: see note to 21 August 1964.
Koenig: Peter William Koenig, “‘Splinters from the Yew Tree’: A Critical Study of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions,” PhD diss., New York University (1971).
page 689: fearing that his art career began with copying a forgery, Wyatt discovers that the Bosch painting he copied from was indeed the original, not a fake, so he says with considerable relief, “—Thank God there was the gold to forge!
To Matthew Gaddis
[WG enclosed a review of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s novel Quake in which Morris Dickstein discusses “the One Big Book syndrome”: “Such disparate writers as Ralph Ellison, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon appear to have fallen prey to the syndrome in the last two decades [...]. Instead of publishing, they have tantalized their admirers with fragments of work in progress, which quickly conspire with time to make the Work itself seem all the more elusive” (New York Times Book Review, 22 October 1972, 4).]
Piermont, NY
2 November 72
Dear Matthew,
Can’t believe it. Thursday again. I’m beginning to think there are more Thursdays than other days of the week because each one reminds me how fast time is passing.
And I hardly needed the enclosed reminder in the New York Times Book Review of having appeared to fall prey to the One Big Book problem, and trying to solve it by writing Another Big Book . . . I am not ‘trying to tantalize’ admirers of The Recognitions by just publishing fragments of J R . . . apparently I’m regarded as an ‘experimental’ writer, and one thing that takes so much time with J R seems to be that since it’s almost all in dialogue I’m constantly listening, write a line and then have to stop and listen, does it sound like this character talking? and get across his feeling and appearance without me describing them? Anyhow they spelled my name right . . . [...]
with much love from Papa
To Thomas J. J. Altizer
[Radical theologian and author (1927– ), then teaching at SUNY Stony Brook.]
Piermont, NY
10 February 1973
Dear Dr. Altizer.
I am sorry to be late answering your letter and, next, to send you the unsatisfactory response this will probably prove to be. Of course I was and remain most impressed and gratified by your response to The Recognitions especially upon looking at the list of your own publications, all of which may be why I found your letter a difficult one to rise to and may also partly explain the time I have taken precoccupied by why this should be so.
First certainly the aspect of Christianity itself and the distant thing it has become to me in these 20 years since the book was written. I am not being facetious when I say it is a long time since I have read it; but certainly it betrays my suspicions even then just inhowfar I was sincere and serious in its preoccupation with Christian redemption as opposed to the attraction of versions of Christianity as vehicles for writing about redemption. Regarding Roman Catholicism for instance it obviously had its attractions and I was pleased at the time the literate Catholics who saw the derogatory & ridiculous ‘anti’Church material as all there to strengthen rather than weaken the idea of the Church that could survive it. But in the years since I’ve come finally to regard Roman Catholicism as the most thoroughly irritating and irrelevant anachronism in sight and the incongruity of the Papacy simply appalling, really surprised at the vehemence of my own feelings.
Basically I suppose what seems to have drained away is any but the faintest nostalgia for absolutes, finite imperfectability without Wyatt’s grateful revelation that ‘there was the gold to forge’. What’s remained seems to be preoccupation with the Faust legend as pivotal posing the question: what is worth doing? (Wyatt was meant to be not the depth of genius, which knows, but just short of it & therewith the dilemma, the very height of talent, which doesn’t.)
At any rate it is this question what is worth doing? that has dogged me all my life, both in terms of my own life and work where I am trying now again in another book to fight off its destructive element and paralyzing effects; and in terms of America which has been in such desperate haste to succeed in finding all the wrong answers. In this present book satire comic or what have you on money and business I get the feeling sometimes I’m writing a secular version of its predecessor.
Returning to The Recognitions I had pretty much from the first a feeling of sending it out on its own, of being (top of p. 96) simply ‘the human shambles that follows it around’; and both time and its original meager reception have I suppose only g
one to strengthen that feeling, again not being flippant I wonder how much use I would be in discussing it, still surprised (of course greatly pleased) at letters from college age students who find it relevant.
Surely none of this lessens my appreciation of your estimate of it and I would be most intrigued to see any use you made of it in your own work (I’m not that clear remembering Under the Volcano and never read Ulysses), right now about 30 miles up the Hudson here panic stricken in terms of time work money this book but would look forward to meeting and talking with you at some point if the above isn’t entirely self defeating.
Thank you again for all in your letter and its tacit encouragement at a welcome time.
Yours,
William Gaddis
destructive element: cf. Jack Gibbs’s description of his work-in-progress as a “sort of social history of mechanization and the arts, the destructive element” (J R 244).
To Candida Donadio
[Well-known literary agent (1929–2001) whose clients included Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon. She was WG’s agent from the early 1960s (when she was at Russell & Volkening) until the early 1990s. The following concerns a rival offer made by Georges Belmont of Éditions Robert Laffont to publish a French translation of R, on which Gallimard was dragging its feet.]
Piermont
17 April 1973
Dear Candida,
I enclose a letter from Jean Lambert pleading on Gallimard’s behalf, and a carbon of my letter to him which I have not sent. Will you please call me when you have read it and tell me if you think I should make any changes or deletions (or additions) (I think for instance the $600 figure is correct?) —since a copy of it will probably go posthaste to Gallimard. Poor Lambert, honestly his position in the whole thing is the only part that would make me want to change our position, otherwise I see none, it damned near seems that Gallimard is blackmailing him and me through him, and I only wish one could be sure Gallimard would sell Lafonte the Lambert translation if they drop out. At any rate I will hold the letter till I hear from you but think one should go off as soon as possible.