line to Ananda: on p. 893 of R, Wyatt quotes the Buddha: “I was that king, and all these things were mine! See, Ananda, how all these things are past, are ended, have vanished away . . .” Gaddis’s source was William Richard Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1892).
George Borrow: the Hungarian-Gypsy phrase (quoted on p. 255 of R) is from Borrow’s The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841). Gaddis drew on Borrow’s The Bible in Spain (1843) for other details used in R, but not Lavengro.
Sun: Minkoff’s review of J R, “Is Valhalla Burning?,” appeared in the Cornell Daily Sun, 24 October 1975, 4, 12.
4. Carpenter’s Gothic, 1975–1985
To Candida Donadio
Piermont NY
8 December 1975
Dear Candida,
I’m spending the days going through masses of papers, notes, trash, clippings, correspondence, trying to figure out what to do with myself now: America has odd ways of making one feel one’s self a failure. And looking over the fragments of our correspondence assembled, I am just terribly struck at the consistency, from my end, of howls about money, and from yours of reassurances, hopes, encouragement: of course this isn’t really news (and probably hardly unique in your file of writers), but seeing it so all at once did overwhelm me with a clearer sense of what I’ve put you through year after year, and I wish to Christ it had finally come up on the note of triumph you have hoped and worked so hard for.
And instead we’re picking up the pieces, with nothing left to do but work with what we’ve got. I talked with Bob [Gottleib] late Thursday, and since he’ll be away for a week we should probably try to prepare for the situation we may face when he returns.
Bob said, first, that Bantam does not want J R—he thinks Jaffe has probably not read it (and I paranoically suspect the hand of that schmuck Solataroff)—leaving only Avon and Ballantine. He had heard nothing from Avon, which I imagine could only mean they have not been encouraged by their sales of The Recogntitions. Leaving only Ballantine, who he said have shown interest (he’d talked to them earlier in the day) but, though I gather no hard figures were mentioned, in the 30 to 40 thousand area, which Bob seemed to be considering if nothing better suddenly comes along, and apparently with the feeling it will not.
If this is the case, I can understand his wanting to cut his losses, especially where they involve my generous advances, and this last 5 thousand makes it even more difficult for me to withhold my consent; but if it does come to such a decision what is your feeling?
Obviously it’s as easy as it is foolish to second-guess the past, and suspect that if we had played it straight with a $12.50 hardcover edition a decent reprint sale would have followed those on-the-whole excellent reviews. I think Ballantine indicated they felt Knopf’s paperback had already cut into their potential market, though that may just be a ploy. So what I wonder now is whether, having taken this hardcover-softcover course, we would be wise just to stay on it for awhile.
Bob says that sales are good: not poor but not terrific either. Yet of a hardcover printing of 5000 they’d shipped about 4700, and more than 26,000 of the softcover printing of 35,000, which sounds (though I’m aware ‘shipped’ doesn’t mean ‘sold’) a bit better than good to me. I don’t recall the softcover royalty rate we agreed on, but say it is 5%, if they did now sell 30,000 softcover and 5000 hardcovers, my royalties on the former would come to $9000 and $7500 on the latter. Thus if I presently owe Knopf $65,000, minus these royalties of $16,500 and minus the $8500 from BOM, I would still owe them $40,000.
In other words, assuming those figures hold together, a $40 thousand reprint sale would still leave me owing Knopf $20,000—and is that worth letting J R’s future out of our hands, as The Recognitions is probably forever for the miserable sum it brought? And so it is my feeling that if J R brings reprint offers of only 30–40 thousand, we should shrug them off and wait it out. I remember—when hopes were brighter—what you thought Knopf would do if offered $100 thousand, you shrugged and said they’d turn it down. I hope you still feel that way, and that Bob will too. Though of course my grounds for asking your and his confidence in the book’s long term prospects, or in mine at this point, are hard to imagine.
[no signature]
Jaffe: Marc Jaffe, editorial director of Bantam, which had published the mass-market edition of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. WG and his agent hoped Bantam would pay a similar amount for rights to J R. In the end, no one bought the rights, a crushing disappointment to WG.
Solataroff: Ted Solataroff (1928–2008), American editor and writer. His literary journal, New American Review, was funded by Bantam.
$12.50 hardcover edition: instead, Knopf followed the Gravity’s Rainbow model and published a split edition: a small printing of a hardcover priced at $15 and a larger printing of a trade paperback.
BOM: Book-of-the-Month Club, which published an edition for their members (an alternate choice, not the main selection).
To John W. Aldridge
[An American critic (1922–2007) who taught at the University of Michigan for most of his career. As WG notes below, Aldridge first wrote about his work in his 1956 book In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity (McGraw-Hill), where he lamented the poor critical reception of R (and Alan Harrington’s Revelations of Dr. Modesto) and wrote, “it is difficult to understand how the reward of reputation can ever come to the author of either novel, for there exists at present no agency able or willing to keep their names alive in the public consciousness until the time when they publish their next books. There is no assurance, furthermore, that when that time comes they will fare any differently, except that the chances are excellent they will run afoul of the prevailing hostility to second novels and be obliterated once and for all” (201). Aldridge’s positive review of J R, “The Ongoing Situation,” appeared in Saturday Review, 4 October 1975, 27–30, and was reprinted in his book The American Novel and the Way We Live Now (Oxford Univ. Press, 1983).]
Piermont NY 10968
15 December 1975
Dear John Aldridge.
After The Reception That Was Handed The Recognitions twenty years ago, I almost felt that if the time ever did come when further work of mine was well received I’d resist notes of thanks as firmly as I had writing any of indignant dismay that first time out. But at this point, with J R finally off on his own and the flurry of reviews past, it would be plain bad manners of me not to send you some expression of the real appreciation I do in fact feel.
I’m afraid I’m still not (as Bast blurts out) “running around thanking everybody” for what has seemed to me J R’s very fortunate reception, tempered by some somewhat disheartening but honestly arrived at dissent but I think short of the usual quota of guile and incompetence with only a couple of prominent (I should say prominently placed) exceptions—so I’m not writing this to thank you for a ‘favourable review’. What I did appreciate was its informed quality that I felt reflected your long concern for what I have tried to do. You can have for instance no idea how many times that paragraph from In Search of Heresy, asking if there were any reason under prevailing conditions to believe I might fare better a second time around, has rattled in my head these years since, pulling me up short and then pushing me along to keep believing the thing real for long enough to finish it, and so it was extremely gratifying to see that you felt I came through.
Yours with best regards,
William Gaddis
To Robert Minkoff
Piermont N.Y.
7 January 1976
Dear Robert Minkoff.
Had I been more prompt with my response to your earlier letter and queries I might have saved you a lot of trouble on this last one which practically crossed it in the mail, since I did try to make clear that after more than 20 years I haven’t the sort of detailed recall for sources you assume, or either the time or inclination to immerse myself in this project to the degree you appear to require. Undoubtedly there is materi
al here in boxes of discarded notes which will probably eventually be dumped on some college library but if I tried to go through them now for your queries I would be doing nothing else; the more cogent point though is that the alertness goes on during the writing & when the book’s done I’m pretty much finished with it, it becomes its own argument open to any attack or interpretation & whether you feel it’s ‘symbolically unified’ interests you a great deal more than it does me, or Mr Koenig. Regarding the so-called ‘unpublished introduction’ to The Recognitions for instance, that business about ‘my roses are not roses but splinters from the yew tree’ was discarded simply as pompous nonsense which it is, and the reason that that is an ‘unpublished introduction’ is that it never was an introduction at all but simply one more wrong direction one pulls up short on seeking the right ones. Doodling. Since the very act of writing a novel is selection, the peril of academic approaches that go beyond the published work to the unpublished which has probably as much value or less as the myriad unselected approaches never put on paper. Why didn’t Mark Twain ever write the book about Tom and Huck aged 60 talking over old times.
The Yew tree reference only recalls to me that one book I read when I was working on The Recognitions was Robert Graves’ The White Goddess & in this way other random sources come to mind: Edgar Saltus, Andrew Lang, Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, Montague Summers’ Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (possible for your cruz con espejos query) but you see the random nature of the reading involved.
Elsewhere, I think I recall coming on ‘inherent vice’ as an accepted term for unprepared canvases & chemically unsympathetic paints but don’t know where. Talitha cumi, Mark 5:41 (damsel, arise). Mary B Eddy probably has the error of matter someplace in Science & Health. The K Mansfield quote I think was in a review she wrote of a book by E M Forster, may be in her Notebooks. Maní, Sp. for peanut (chorus of The Peanut Vendor). Bishop Whutley is Whately (wrote Christian Evidences) but I don’t recall the reference. Those are the easy & immediate, you’re certainly free to do what you like with the Flying Dutchman, Peer Gynt references & mythic parallels, why I write big novels & what they reflect and no, to a question I think you asked me at some point, what I write you isn’t for publication or inclusion in a paper but an attempt at a courteous effort to detour you from exactly that back to your own approach to what you’re up to.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
[In a postscript, Minkoff asked, among other things, if Gaddis knew of anyone else writing on his work and about J R’s sources, to which WG responded in a postscript:]
Regarding this I have no idea.
I don’t offhand think of any books business or otherwise that seminal to J R. I recall such incidents as the Moncrieff-smelter deal being based on an unsavoury heist by Eisenhower’s Treasury secretary Geo Humphrey and involving, I believe, Freeport Sulphur, in the ’50s; the Gandia ‘civil war’ on something similarly brazen pulled by Union Minière in the Congo probably early 60s; but I’ve finished and finished with J R for the time being at any rate don’t wish or plan to get into it again but simply leave it lay where Jesus flung it as the woman said, so trust you will not take the time to a questionnaire. Good luck with it,
WG
‘unpublished introduction’: this was published first in Koenig’s dissertation (pp. 156–57), and then as an appendix to my A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 298–99.
Edgar Saltus: author of The Anatomy of Negation (1886), a sardonic survey of atheism.
Lang [...] Summers: see Reader’s Guide for WG’s use of the works by Lang, de Rougemont, and Summers.
Science & Health: by Mary Baker Eddy, 1875; the standard book on Christian Science.
Mansfield quote: from a review of a novel by E. V. Lucas, rpt. in Mansfield’s posthumous Novels and Novelists, ed. J. Middleton Murray (Constable & Co., 1930).
The Peanut Vendor: a song Otto hears in part 3, chapter 1 of R.
Whately: Archbishop Richard Whately (1787–1863) published the handbook Christian Evidences in 1837, but it does not include the anecdote recounted on p. 764 of R.
Geo Humphrey [...] Freeport Sulfur: in 1957, Humphrey was involved in a multimillion-dollar contract for Freeport Sulphur, a large copper producer, to buy nickel and cobalt from Cuba, which came under investigation by the Justice Department.
Union Minière: a Belgian mining company, which in 1961 (according to Wikipedia) “supported the secession of the province of Katanga from the Congo and the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister after Belgian colonial rule. Upon the province’s secession, the Union transferred 1.25 billion Belgian francs (35 million USD) into Moïse Tshombe’s bank account, an advance on 1960 taxes which should in fact have been paid to Lumumba’s government. On December 31, 1966, the Congolese government, under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, took over the possessions and activities of the [Union Minière], transforming it into Gécamines (Société générale des Carrières et des Mines), a state-owned mining company.”
To John W. Aldridge
[Typed on mock stationery from “The JR Family Of Companies,” under which WG typed “(Now in Receivership).” Aldridge had written to thank WG for his letter of 15 December 1975, all the more surprising given WG’s reputation for being “elusive,” and to suggest getting together in New York later that spring. As WG notes, reviewers outside New York found J R more accessible than their big-city counterparts did.]
Piermont NY 10968
28 January 1976
Dear John Aldridge.
Thanks for your note. I wish I could say that by spring we would expect to be in Athens, or Venice, even Key West—but as things stand that looks hardly likely so by all means if you wish, let me know here in Piermont if you are in the NY neighborhood. It’s not terribly far and I’d be happy to come in for a drink.
I’ve got tagged elusive I guess by generally trying to avoid what I’ve felt to be rather egregious forces constantly ready to put the man in the place of his work—self defeating perhaps, I don’t know. Like the notion that J R is generally accessible, till assured otherwise by the New Yorker; Cleveland, Kansas City, Chattanooga yes even Grand Rapids to the contrary notwithstanding. Was it Gertrude Lawrence? who said —What we lose on the swings, we make up on the roundabouts.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
Gertrude Lawrence: English actress and musical-comedy star (1898–1952). The quotation is a British fairground metaphor.
To Sarah Gaddis
Piermont
30 January 1976
Dear Sarah,
Thanks for your and Peter’s letter, mainly for all its vitality and cheer in this post-publication limbo. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, but whatever it was hasn’t. Simply gleaning late reviews: ‘Joyous’ says Chattanooga Tennessee, ‘Millionaires in the Sky’ says St Louis . . . ‘unreadable’ says my old favourite New Yorker and goes on along those lines in the most gratuitously vicious way (what did I ever do to them?). Glad to know there are 2 copies of J R contaminating Ireland (I sent one to Marc Brandel), at any rate.
Not the highest spirits right now, in great part certainly because yesterday another funeral —you remember us talking about Tony Harwood, old friend and classmate and a real exotic married to the 70-or-so year old Princess Mdvani of Russia’s Tsarist days, we were to go in and have dinner with them this evening & instead went to his funeral yesterday. What’s absurd of course is how selfishly one takes these things, feel that someone so really rare and odd and kind and devoted to Judith and me has simply been stolen from us (heart attack talking on the phone & probably never really knew what was happening to him); and equally absurd to be surprised, such things do happen every day after all, why are we always so startled? And a certain envy creeps in for the Catholic Latin nations like Spain where death is a part of life; here the reaction is, Dead? but he can’t be. We were to have dinner Thursday . . .
> I don’t mean to dwell on it, on the other hand it is something that we in America tend to exclude from our thoughts & so are inevitably unprepared when it occurs close to us, all bouncing along as though we were immortal. Yesterday Matthew’s 18th birthday and certainly not the way I’d expected to spend it (you see? selfish again . . .) So at any rate with these things in my mind I take down Plato’s Crito, which is the dialogue describing Socrates going to his death, and there folded in the book is a yellow page with this message covering it:
DEAR FAIRY I CANNOT FIND MY TOOTH IT CAME OUT FROM THE LOWER ROW TODAY I SHALL NOT EXPECT ANOTHER DIME LOVE SARAH
All which I suppose goes back to Wilder’s message about living ‘every every minute’ and all the joy of your and Matthew’s lives have given me since that is what you are both doing. Better I think sometimes than I am. Though perhaps my age is a time one pauses and tries to sort things out, thinks suddenly good Lord! When Mozart was my age he’d been dead for seventeen years!
The point of all this rambling to you being a kind of gratitude I guess for the affirmation in your life, in your and Peter’s lives and Matthew’s —even though sometimes I get impatient and uncertain about its direction, their directions, damndest thing is people saying I’m negative whereas it’s these affirmations of life amidst its appalling uncertainties and setbacks that I most admire.
End of next week I’m going up to Cambridge for this rowdy Lampoon affair (complete with fireworks they promise (also ‘Torchlight Processions, and other Delights too humorous to mention’) . . . then I may spend a night with Barney Emmart up at Salem & return Monday to see Matthew and try to get some notion of his next step —and he being now 18 it may be a large one. He has talked about France but as I recall in terms of growing vegetables there and I hope to be able to bring up some other possibilities —though I’ve got to say at this point in life I look around and think perhaps one nice eggplant is worth four of Plato’s dialogues after all. [...]