Looking back, what finally did strike me heavily was this sense of really how little you’ve asked and how much you’ve given over these whole 10 years: planning a detailed trip to Europe or Mexico and then saying it’s as good as having taken it when it doesn’t work out, but of course gradually it’s got to seep in that it may never—and then when something as small by comparison as Key West is as important to you as it was and I’m finally aware that apparently I couldn’t even really let you have that, all the while thinking that I did—well, you say I take your problems and turn them into my own but this does seem to be one of my problems and I hope I’ve learned something. (I have to add here though that I do have very fond memories of us in Key West, of all the rooms in that house and quiet drinks we had and cycling down for the paper, the postoffice, Anderson staring glazed over the hybiscus and twenty years of his life that have just gone by.) [...]
I’ve wondered if perhaps, with all our uncompleted projects, we’re both spoiled in an odd way. I’ve wondered how much your reading J R, after these years of it dwelling in the back room there suddenly exposing itself and myself, has had to do with dormant problems abruptly stepping forth. I’ve wondered at the success of these stage and screen revivals of Ibsen’s Doll’s House written something like 75 years ago to lie around in college drama courses all that time now suddenly right on. I certainly look at Thorvald with a painful twinge of recognition. [...]
And in the outside world—well, I’ll already have spoken to you of my obvious disappointment, to put it mildly, over this English offer of £750 for J R, I mean Christ that’s less than Harper’s is paying for 30 pages of it! Candida professes to be undiscouraged and does make the point, which I knew, that English publishing is having a very hard time, but she is pressing forward. I spent a Mafiaesque afternoon with her yesterday and all I can say is wait and pray: she is just going to have no nonsense with this book (insofar I suppose as the economy will allow). I’d been over to see Bob Gottlieb whom I do like a lot but he is really skittish as hell for New York’s (US’s) most prominent and successful publisher—I mean you think I have doubts and abrupt negative glimpses, well . . . his of course are clothed in a certain excitement which must make them more attractive than my weary insights, so {***} you see? Life is not all bad. But there is an excitement there at Knopf about the book and I stood Janet Halverson’s jacket up against a book on his wall of them and it really knocks them all out, much more impressive with the colours than the xerox I sent you just to give you an idea. I’d said (as with The Recognitions) I felt that black red and white in hard colours has the most class and weight, so Janet (just as with The Recognitions) gave me black red and white and added gold, and I mean gold not yellow. I hope you will like it.
I just talked with Lewis Lapham on the ’phone, they’re not simply putting my name on the cover they’re making it the cover illustration, sawing back and forth whether it’s to be the corporate tenement or Rhoda in the Bath with a Rembrandt painting to illustrate, he wanted a larger or perhaps more precise title than I’d given and now has 6 or 8 to choose from and for background (‘what the book’s “about”’) I told him to talk to Knopf where they’re now writing the jacket copy and can be more objective (saleswise that is to say) than I: now what more could a publisher want in the way of propaganda! [...] I do want very much I think starting tomorrow morning to start on changes I want to make in the book’s last 20 pages which I’d like to have done when the proofs come through so as not to drive everyone (you) else (myself) up the wall of “William’s writing . . .” in May. [...]
Judith I just love you, I know not entirely satisfactorily but at the least where I can’t back your fantasies I will try and even more your realities even not understanding them but knowing they are real, I love you undiminished and that’s the un-understood reality of mine.
W.
Santabel: i.e., Sanibel Island, off the coast of southwest Florida.
Anderson: Bob Anderson, retired New York City lighting director then living in Key West.
revivals of Ibsen’s Doll’s House [...] Thorvald: the women’s liberation movement inspired stage revivals and two films in 1973 based on Ibsen’s 1879 drama. Thorvald is the husband of the play’s heroine, Nora Helmer.
£750: about $7,000 today.
Harper’s: published in its June issue as “Nobody Grew but the Business” (pp. 47–54, 59–66).
Bob Gottlieb: Robert Gottlieb (1931– ), then editor-in-chief at Knopf.
Janet Halverson: highly regarded jacket designer who worked from the 1950s (including R’s jacket) through the 1990s.
Lewis Lapham: (1935– ), managing editor of Harper’s at the time (promoted to editor the following year).
Rhoda [...] Rembrandt: the published cover photo is based on Rembrandt’s Bathing Woman (1654).
To Grace Eckley
[A Joyce scholar who was researching a paper later published as “Exorcising the Demon Forgery, or the Forging of Pure Gold in Gaddis’s Recognitions,” in Literature and the Occult, ed. Luanne Frank (Univ. of Texas Press, 1977), 125–36.]
Piermont NY
3 June 1975
Dear Miss Eckley.
I appreciate your interest in The Recognitions & have to tell you I’ve about reached the end of the line on questions about what I did or didn’t read of Joyce’s 30 years ago. All I read of Ulysses was Molly Bloom at the end which was being circulated for salacious rather than literary merits; No I did not read Finnegans Wake though I think a phrase about ‘psychoanaloosing’ one’s self from it is in The Recognitions; Yes I read some of Dubliners but don’t recall how many & remember only a story called ‘Counterparts’; Yes I read a play called Exiles which at the time I found highly unsuccessful; Yes I believe I read Portrait of an Artist but also think I may not have finished it; No I did not read commentary on Joyce’s work & absorb details without reading the original. I also read, & believe with a good deal more absorbtion, Eliot, Dostoevski, Forster, Rolfe, Waugh, why bother to go on, anyone seeking Joyce finds Joyce even if both Joyce & the victim found the item in Shakespear, read right past whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot &c, all which will probably go on so long as Joyce remains an academic cottage industry.
Clearly this matter of ‘influences’ is a floodgate which I’m afraid I’ve neither the time nor patience to open now & I apologize to you for sounding as impatient over the whole matter as in fact I am, but if I do not mail you this will probably end up appearing even more rude by never getting any response off to you at all, and hope your work goes well the above notwithstanding.
Yours,
William Gaddis
‘psychoanaloosing’: Anselm twice refers to the critic in the green wool shirt as a “three-time psychoanaloser” (R 183, 453). In Finnegans Wake, Yawn boasts, “I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want” (Viking, 1939), 522.
Rolfe: Frederick Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo (1860–1913), British Catholic homosexual novelist and historian. His works include the novels Hadrian VIII (1904) and The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, as well as a history of the Borgias.
To David Susskind
[American producer (1920–87) of movies, TV shows, and plays, and a well-known talk-show host. Sometime in the 1960s WG had written a screenplay for a Western entitled One Fine Day—called Dirty Tricks in J R and described as the character Schramm’s World War II experiences transposed to the Old West with Faustian overtones (391, 396)—which was mentioned in Time magazine’s review of J R. Nothing came of the project.]
21 October 1975
Dear Mr Susskind,
I greatly appreciate your direct call yesterday and your interest in this Western project of mine.
As I mentioned to you then, I’d just been going through it again with an eye to making certain changes which now seem important enough to me to take care of before showing it. I hope this delay will not cause inconvenience or a lessening of your interest, my agent will send a copy right on to you when I have it in shape and I hope
there may still be opportunity to meet and talk with you.
Yours,
William Gaddis
To Sarah Gaddis
Piermont NY
Halloween [1975]
Dear Sarah,
As you probably know by now we were given an excellent dinner and evening by our mutual friend Mr Quesenbery last week, then on Wednesday very fancy lunch by Knopf so at least I’m getting some fine meals out of all this! (Even had dinner last night with Dick and Ruth Green in New York, all great except for a flat tire coming home—very cold).
Everything still in suspense except we have learned there will be a good review next Sunday (the 8th) front page of New York Times Book Review except that apparently I have to share it with another writer named Donald Barthelme damn it! Well half a loaf is better than none? And—look in this coming week issue of Newsweek where I understand we are treated quite well.
Thank the Lord just this morning arrived a check from the English publisher of J R so I can send you the enclosed (will this tight rope walking ever end?). I wish it were more of course but at least you will have November allowance plus a new dress and I hope you can find one you like immensely (and Peter likes!)—I’ll probably talk to you again before you get this but meanwhile love always as you know,
Papa
Mr Quesenbery: William Doyle Quesenbery, Jr. (1930–2008), Dean of Admissions at Swarthmore College.
Donald Barthelme: his novel The Dead Father shared the front page; WG’s review was by George Stade.
Newsweek: Peter S. Prescott’s enthusiastic review appeared in the 10 November issue, 103.
English publisher of J R: Jonathan Cape, released in 1976 (with some corrections that wouldn’t be made in American editions until 1985).
Peter: Peter Conley, Sarah’s future first husband.
To John and Pauline Napper
Piermont NY
1 November 75
Dear John and Pauline,
finally a note off to you from the malaise that appears to follow publication and all the uncertainties that go with it, grand dreams of financial liberation in the midst of pounding debt because the American pattern is one of such absurd extremes in terms of “success” and “failure”—so we wait and pray for work, living for the moment on a rather pittance finally literally wrung out of Jonathan Cape who will bring the book out there (why I don’t know, who the hell in England as it is today wants to read about an 11-year-old American entrepreneur?)
I’ve mainly exorcised recent demons by laying a floor and building bookcases in the garage here which at last, now the studying is done, begins to look like a “study”—and have gone back to make some revisions on that Faust western as a film script which we hope to sell on the strength of J R’s publicity—God knows if or when it will become a book, it would be just such an immense pleasure to never have to write anything again except an occasional letter if only to report that we are still in mid-air, though at least the book is out of my hands at last and perhaps good things are ahead which will permit us some freedom and movement, meanwhile I’m glad the copy of J R did reach you and hope you like him, his offensive qualities notwithstanding —more news when we have anything real to report.
love from us,
Willie & Judith
To David Markson
[When Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s negative review of J R appeared in the daily New York Times on 30 October, Markson sent a postcard the same day to WG reading: “Dear Bill—Fuck Christopher Lehmann-Haupt!” (Lehmann-Haupt had also written a negative review of Markson’s Going Down five years earlier.) Gaddis’s reply, undated and without salutation, plays on a joke in J R whereby a foreigner takes literally a dictionary definition of “sympathy” (488–89); see 3 November 1975 for the reference to WG’s agent, Candida Donadio.]
Problem with you Markson you’ve got no God damned fellow feeling in bosom, put yourself in the poor bastard’s place: like if your wife wrote a novel and the best agent in town declined to handle it, would you go around giving a free ride to the agent’s clients? I mean why the hell do you think some poor bastard wants to be a book calumnist in the first place.
To Charles Monaghan
[Another response to the Times review by Lehmann-Haupt, whom Monaghan mocked as Schumann-Heink (the name of a European soprano).]
[3 November 1975]
Dear Chas. —thanks for your condolence re Schumann-Heink, I’d like of course to think it’s simply one more sample of this tired bastard’s usual muddled mind. I mean it couldn’t have anything to do with my agent having recently declined a novel by his wife, now could it.
Attached is an item Judith ran up which I forbade her to send the Times (though I certainly wouldn’t object if others wrote them regarding his simple incompetence) & look forward to seeing your piece.
best regards
W. Gaddis (finished indeed!)
[The enclosure was the following parody of Lehamnn-Haupt’s review of J R:]
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt does book reviews. Endless, streamlined, compulsive book reviews. Day after day, week after week he does book reviews. He also does summaries, encapsulations, and lifts pages maniacally. Month after month, sometimes overcooked in the rare sense of the word, nitwittywise. And he does question marks, quotes, parentheses and meticulous lists. And so it is not surprising that his latest attempt to review a major literary work—J R by William Gaddis—comes down on us like a collapsed laundry line revealing Mr. Lehmann-Haupt’s washed out metaphors, bleached inadequacies, dangling shortcomings and nonbiodegradable babble.
And yet, extraordinarily enough, an exceptional book can be discerned through the overwhelming tumult of his ambiguities. J R is a hilarious audiovisual novel but it is apparent that Mr. Lehmann-Haupt has neither an eye nor an ear but merely a forked tongue. What he finds amusing and intriguing in one paragraph is qualified or negated in the next.
Does such paranoia seem all too obvious? No more so, I can assure you, than Mr. LehmannHaupt’s other recent thrusts at contemporary fiction and his love affair with tautology. Still he goes on and on, year after year, until we are almost crazy with the meaninglessness of his mindless meaning.
Can a book reviewer be taken seriously if what he gives with one hand, he takes away with the other? So much for C. L-H. He may be worth considering up to a point but I certainly wouldn’t recommend him to intelligent readers who are stupefied by tired book reviewers.
To Matthew Gaddis
Piermont NY
16 November 75
Dear Matthew,
Just in case you missed [an ad in] today’s NY Times Book Review. Of course we know that Gaddis is not a genius (I prefer the reviewer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer who wrote: “J R is a devastatingly funny book. Reading it, I laughed loudly and unashamedly in public places, and at home more than once I saw my small children gather in consternation as tears of laughter ran down my face.”) But Knopf after all is trying to SELL BOOKS and you can imagine how pleased it makes me to see them advertising it this way! Who knows, it might even be seen by Movie People who can’t read books but can read ads . . . So generally we are still sitting with fingers crossed waiting to see what will happen, very nerve-wracking. [...]
All I am pretty certain of regarding our own plans is Sarah’s arrival here with Peter sometime on Friday [...] where you know you would be MORE THAN WELCOMED by all 5 of us if you can and want to come down, though as with Sarah, being able to spend some time with either of you at any point along the way is Thanksgiving enough for us. Whatever Knopf’s ad says, you each give me more to be proud of than J R. (Throw in The Recognitions too.) [...]
much love always,
Papa
Cleveland Plain Dealer: Alicia Metcalf Miller, 9 November 1975.
To Robert Minkoff
[A graduate student at Cornell who was researching a dissertation on Gaddis, later submitted as “Down, Then Out: A Reading of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions,” 1976.]
Piermont NY br />
3 December 1975
Dear Robert Minkoff.
I’m sorry to be so long responding & regret more that I apparently can’t be of help on your reference questions: I look down the spines of books here & cannot imagine which if any of them supplied the line to Ananda 25 years ago (though I must say it’s too lovely a line for me to have originated). Nor can I recall the details of Valentine’s double-agentry, though I’m about certain there was no sun reference in my mind. (In the simple basic structure he was equated with ‘mind’ (thus dying of insomnia), Brown with ‘matter’, Wyatt with ‘creation and love’ (or their absence).) And Rose? I don’t recall having more on her, I think she was intended simply to personify innocence as a casualty (as possibly Esme’s purity was a casualty). And finally the only source I could imagine for the ‘Varé tava . . . &c’ would be George Borrow but have neither his Lavengro nor The Bible in Spain here and would not send you through them on what could very well be a futile search.
I did of course appreciate your detailed effort on J R’s behalf in the Sun there and hope he may provide some entertainment beyond the academic.
Yours,
W. Gaddis