I say ‘gone over the material’ & mean just that, rather than the careful scrutiny called for to make it presentable, for the very simple reason of the time that would be involved quite as I feared. You say for instance that you’d like an interview ‘close to consistent with others in the collection’ but I thought it was clear before you came up that I saw it brief at best, perhaps 1/3 their length. And as I think I said at some point in our conversation a major problem in responding with any serious care to the variety of well meant questionaires that appear in the mail is that these simply beget more questions till it becomes another day or days’ very real distraction from work already postponed for dealing with such worldly insistences as preparing a house for rent, breaking an arm, meeting trains. So a dozen inserted yellow sheets both EXP[AND] & NEW are hardly promising, each by its very nature some fresh consideration (the ‘abuse of the system that particularly affect the artist?’ ‘what kind of fiction is worth doing?’ verisimilitude? realism? &c &c) amounting altogether to an essay I would write (cut, revise, rewrite) if at this point I were so inclined for a clear & supported statement without such flippant references as Judith Krantz, Gardner, even Solzhenitsyn, in place of those that stand up close & real, as Samuel Butler.
I know you’ve already spent a good deal of time on this but I right now simply cannot afford to spend even more on it myself as would be required, since I am trying to make a concerted effort to get down to work again on a book already but barely started, which demands this opportunity (time unfragmented) to grasp & believe its atmosphere rather than reconsider that of work gone before & now off on its own so far as I’m concerned, or perhaps better to say must be concerned since my responses to your questions already given hardly appear to support that position.
With your care to seeing the writer plain I hope we can put this aside for a while until its prospects look more satisfactory to us both.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
Judith Krantz, Gardner, even Solzhenitsyn: mentioned on pp. 22, 26, and 19, respectively, in the published interview.
To William H. Gass
Wainscott, NY 11975
25 August 1980
Dear Bill.
Attending a stylish Hamptons opening of a very good painter out here—most of her pictures of rumpled pillows & bedclothes (I like a picture that tells a story)—imagine my surprise, & delight, at seeing the cover of a familiar book lurking among the sheets. Well! Next to reading, this is about the neatest tribute I’ve come across, though of course she’s read it too which is, of course, why it’s nestled in the sheets. Her name is Polly Kraft (wife of columnist Joe Kraft), serious & most competent in her own right as you will I think agree when you hold the enclosed slides up to the light. I inveigled them from her on grounds of your sterling generous & rowdy character & Mary’s good looks.
I write this on the assumption that you are all still alive, after day after day reports of 114o in St Louis (my recollection being –10o); but in all likelihood you got away. I saw Georges Bourchardt’s nifty looking wife at a restaurant & she told me that Stanley with full family complement had passed through Breadloaf-bound & in high spirits & good health, glad to hear that. I am mainly simply loaf-bound: escaped from Knopf for Viking (a move I’d encourage you in, if you ever consider such, enthusiastic leaves-you-alone (so far) editor named Elizabeth Sifton, dghtr of a prominent theologian), & am trying by weak force of will alone to start another book, no damned thick square book this time but I hope simply a ‘romance’ but trouble still coming up with the fueling indignation, the only thing that rouses me these days all these God damned born-agains & evangelicals.
Again, if you or you all should possibly come through I’d hope for a call, though I see the academic year (I’m skipping it this time round) is at hand; & we’ll probably stay out here on Long Island’s end into the fall.
best always,
Bill Gaddis
Polly Kraft: American artist (1932– ) who worked in watercolor and oil.
Georges Bourchardt: Borchardt and his wife Anne, literary agents.
Elizabeth Sifton: i.e., Elisabeth Sifton (1939– ), daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr. CG would be published under her imprint in 1985.
To Sarah Gaddis
Wainscott, NY
[late October? 1980]
Dear Sarah.
Thanks, thanks for your bright letter. I wish I could do the same. I am at my worst right now, a worst you remember in terms of EKodak, IBM &c: uptight, strung out, bundle of nerves, on this piece I so lightly said I’d write for the WSJournal magazine on Failure & now have 4 days left & needless to say hundreds of shreds of paper which I keep rearranging: the constant threat which has silenced better minds than mine (v. Martin [Dworkin]) of being so overwhelmed by one’s material that one just gives it up (speaking of failure!), & always the wellwishers saying Oh don’t get upset, it will all fall into place . . .
So congratulations to Peter on getting published but tell him not to make a habit of it, it can drive you right up the wall. I didn’t see the NYer piece on publishing but the NYTimes did run 2 long articles, of course all one has ever heard is them bemoaning their difficulties over their lobster Newberg lunches but this time they may be right; the only thing is of course like everybody it never occurs to them to blame themselves for the sheer greed that has driven them to pay $1 and $2 million for crap like Judith Kranz & now find themselves in trouble & all the rest of us with them.
Though we did take time out for a vast NY party given by a bunch called Poets & Writers, took Matthew & his treat was dancing with Abby Hoffman’s girlfriend, mine was sitting beside a breezy dame who introduced herself as Joan Fontaine, now back in Wainscott (not MHG, he’s working hard in NY & very happy at it) at a ‘work table’ with these thousand paper scraps looking out at rain wild winds & whitecaps on the pond, frantic V formations of ducks & geese honking in the grey skies I hope they know where they’re going.
& one other item enclosed, you have got to go see this Japanese movie Kagemusha because—aside from the story, largely battles between 16th century war lords—their outfits are simply staggering, I have never seen so many different patterns & colours & could only think of you in there with a pad & pencil going mad at not being able to note them down fast enough.
Aside from this frantic WSJ piece (& the $ that should go with it) plans are fluid, I think we’ll go back into NY to stay right after the elections which should give us a good deal of entertainment, I have to confess I see it all so hapless that this year for the first time I think I may not vote, I know that is the bad citizen but I have voted against people rather than for their opponents so many times (HHumphrey for 1) that I am just not going out to vote against Reagan now, though if he is elected he should offer us a good 4 years of awful entertainment (in my opinion!).
I’ve got to get back to my scrap heap & just look forward, as I always do, to the day we can all relax together though it seems to be always just around the corner. [...]
best to Peter & much love always,
Papa
Failure: WG’s essay “The Rush for Second Place” was originally entitled “Failure” and intended for a new magazine supplement to the Wall Street Journal, but when that failed to materialize, WG submitted it to Harper’s, where it was published under a new title in April 1981 (RSP 38–61).
Poets & Writers: the writers’ organization held a tenth-anniversary party on 22 October 1980 at the Roseland Ballroom.
Abby Hoffman: American political activist (1936–89).
Joan Fontaine: British American actress (1917– ) who had published her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, two years earlier.
Kagemusha: 1980 film written and directed by Akira Kurosawa.
HHumphrey: Democrat Hubert Humphrey ran against Republican Richard Nixon in 1968.
WG and Muriel Oxenberg Murphy at the Poets & Writers tenth-anniversary party, October 1980 (photo by Thomas Victor).
To Tom LeClair
 
; 235 East 73rd street, P.H. A
New York NY 10021
22 November 1980
Dear Tom LeClair.
Just a note to say that a friend pointed out to me your letter in the New Republic & well done: how Kazin’s dreary pomposity is still taken seriously is quite beyond me, he has been around ‘patronizing his betters’ for far too long & some kind of disestablishmentarian movement is long overdue.
You make your case most succinctly which is really the point of this note as the element I found missing in our interview & due, I readily believe, to my own maundering in conversation as opposed to the better chance for trenchancy in the (re)written word. We may try again some time (not immediately); meanwhile, good work
and best regards,
William Gaddis
letter in New Republic: a letter to the editor (22 November 1980, 3) in response to Kazin’s article “American Writing Now” (in the 18 October issue) chastising Kazin for ignoring WG and other innovative novelists.
To William H. Gass
[Upon being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, for which Gass had written a recommendation.]
New York, New York 10021
12 April 1981
Dear Bill.
Do you read the small print in the Times? Do you KNOW what joy (read money, prestige, vainglory) your kind effort has contributed to this modest household? That yes, the Guggenheim people did actually respond positively to your recommendation? Of course I should never have doubted.
But what a treat, what a treat to have managed such a thing without Mitcheners & Mailers, Biddles & Bobs (Gotliebs) & ‘who you know’; rather, 3 noncelebrities & 1 Captain (yourself) by whom I flatter myself I’m a captain.
I should also note I really am working on the book, the ‘romance’ (nothing I think that can be accused as ‘experimental’ here!), came back a few days ago from Mexico with 50 clean first draft pages so it is not all hornswoggle (though it may turn out to be about hornswoggle) . . .
Joyce?: Q. What are you writing about?
A. I am not writing about something. I am writing something.
Enough of that.
At any rate, we plan to be here & Long Island for the next couple of months and if any chance of you/Mary/the youth group in the neighborhood we would certainly hope to hear & share our quarters city or country. Our summer plans quite happily unresolved though Guggenheim’s kindness opens possibilities well beyond Atlantic City; meanwhile 2 phone numbers below, every best regard to Stanley.
warm thoughts to Mary, to yourself with thanks again,
Bill Gaddis
PS I let off some steam in April Harper’s Magazine which may sporadically amuse you.
Mitcheners [...] Gotliebs: James Michener (correct spelling) and Norman Mailer were novelists; Gottlieb (correct spelling) was WG’s editor at Knopf; Biddle unidentified.
Joyce?: Samuel Beckett said Joyce’s “writing is not about something; it is that something itself” (“Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce,” in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress [Shakespeare and Co., 1929]). Cf. AA 18.
April Harper’s: “The Rush for Second Place,” April 1981, pp. 31–39 (RSP 39–61).
To Fred Exley
[American novelist and sports journalist (1929–92), best known for his memoir-novel A Fan’s Notes (1968), which WG greatly admired. Exley wrote WG 28 April 1981 to say he liked “The Rush for Second Place” and to thank him for mentioning A Fan’s Notes (RSP 56). He cites “EW’s [Evelyn Waugh’s?] dictum—‘the thing is to outlast the sons of bitches’”; says he’s going back to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall and plans to give three lectures on R; reports David Markson’s facetious rumor that “you were incognito, wearing shades and sharing grocery expenses with Pynchon and Salinger, out on Long Island”; and asks about Judith Gaddis.]
Wainscott, NY 11975
14 May 1981
Dear Fred,
Your note a nice surprise, also your kind words for the Harper’s piece which I’m still a little ambivalent about: a pal out here said I’d “tipped my hand” & that sums up the doubts though it did pay for 2 months of Mexico including carfare so it can’t be all bad.
Outlast them yes, that’s the only answer: my version a Spanish version of an Arab one &, having neither, an approximation in Eng: Sit in the doorway of your house & watch the bodies of your enemies carried by. Problem is you sit there so God damn long that when the time comes maybe you can’t get up. But (all aphorisms this morning) what we lose on the swings we make up on the roundabouts: fancy movie dreams collapse but a Guggenheim comes through! Never had applied before & O ye of little faith but there last month it was, so vast sighs of relief from the edge of the abyss once again.
No Pynchon or even Salinger (or even Salinger-true-believer support, see attached) here which is pretty much the tail end of L.I. & not quite a Hampton so will probably & unfortunately not be in town for your meteoric passage through (though if chance should have it so I’d signal one place or the other you mention), expect to be out here till the summer migration & escape that for God knows, possibly Mexico again, good clean air for a heavy smoker & a few more words on paper to cheer up the folks at Viking, where I fled from Gottlieb/Knopf; & am frankly relieved with the help of the Googs to go on with the book unbroken by teaching this fall, kind as Bard has been & again asked me back I’ve got to say teaching gives me the blues more often than it inspires.
You say ‘back to Iowa’ which must mean you’ve been there as I wasn’t aware. I was for 2 days once, felt further away than Mexico though from what I’m not sure. But thanks ahead for your lectures on The Recognitions, that again is the God damndest thing: I’ve got about ½ dozen PhD theses on it also word that somebody at Univ of Nebraska Press is bringing out a book on it next year; latest royalty statement 5/5/81, $12.76, less 10% commission enclosed find our check for $11.48 . . . that should inspire them!
Other news, all unclear. Judith last heard from in Key West though even that must be a year ago, I thought you’d likely heard she went down there must be 3 years ago for what I gradually realized was more than a visit, agony all around for she’s still among the best but finally there was no saving it.
Last but major congratulations on your 12-mile-a-day (& sobriety), cigarettes still my resident curse & I will try to take your Good Example to heart,
very best,
Gaddis
attached: unidentified.
12-mile-a-day: an alcoholic, Exley announced in a postscript that he was sober and walking twelve miles a day. In 1983 WG wrote a Guggenheim recommendation for him that reads in part: “I have held his writing in high regard since reading his first book A Fan’s Notes, and in fact made use of that book in teaching courses at Bard College both for its style and for what I found to be its painful grasp of numerous agonies which may be universal to youth but in this writer’s hands become uniquely American. I know few works of fiction—perhaps Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno—that present so well our capacities for self deception.”
To Thomas Sawyer III
[A professor at Northern Montana College who was writing an article later published as “False Gold to Forge: The Forger behind Wyatt Gwyon,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 2.2 (Summer 1982): 50–54, concerning Han van Meegeren (1889–1947), the Dutch forger whose career WG adapted for Wyatt’s in R.]
7 June 1981
Dear Mr Sawyer.
Some of the Wyatt material was drawn from the van Megeren case. The significant departure was this: in Wyatt’s case the talent short of genius was totally in tune with the work it produced; in that of van Megeren the vulgarity of his ‘Vermeers’, immediately apparent to the untrained eye, triumphed through the self-serving ‘experts’ bent on proving their own theses regarding influences &c in Vermeer’s career to the point that they simply could not see what they were looking at.
I’m glad you like the novel.
Yours,
William Gaddis
To Tom LeClair
New York, New York 10021
27 July 1981
Dear Tom LeClair.
Yours of 21 July & ‘no graceful way to ask about the interview’ must provoke no graceful way to decline it. Unfortunately the deadline of your publisher ‘who wants to schedule printing’ has got to be of less concern to me than mine.
For now then, all I can do is recall to you some lines I wrote 30 years ago in The Recognitions (p. 106 in the careless little Avon edition) asking what they want from the artist they didn’t get from his work? & why must one repeat this & repeat it when that is what the whole damned thing is about? If it didn’t come through in the work then what use or interest is an ‘interview’? All the purposes such interviews can serve seem to me, on the one hand, to say ‘this is what I really meant to accomplish’ or, on the other, some definitive statement from the writer regarding his ‘interest in making some statements about fiction and (his) work’ as you say; whereas this is precisely what his work constitutes for better or worse when he offers it, in the best & most final shape he can give it at the time, the final statement in ‘interview’ terms being, of course, his obituary, & the real final statement no more than the sum of the work itself, its fictions offering probably fewer opportunities for misinterpretation even than the interview’s that isn’t what I meant (at all).
So for the moment at any rate your notion of publishing any transcribed version of our talk edited, disclaimed or whatever is unacceptable, as a condition of your original proposal. I appreciate your time and effort spent on it but it was very much the petulance of an afternoon.
Yours,
W. Gaddis