At any rate, Meridian sold printed sheets to a British publisher McGibbon & Key, so only these editions stand corrected since, when Harcourt brought out a further printing & its own ugly paperback, they used old plates or more likely offset their original ed. without, of course, notifying me. (In terms of typos &c the Avon ed. is not even to be discussed; though I suppose I should be glad it’s still in print in any form even that.)
Jack Green had started an exhaustive card catalogue crossfile reference on The Recognitions with an eye, as I recall, to compiling a “Skeleton Key to &c”, heaven knows what became of it.
A quite meticulous translation was done into French by Jean Lambert (was then at Smith College, an ex-Gide son in law!); one rather less so I suspect into Italian (Mondadori) though it got reviewed by, (can’t remember his name, very embarrassing, wrote The Romantic Agony), pleased me greatly of course. The Germans (Rowolt) ran through 2 or 3 translators, finally said they had the man who’d translated Moby Dick into German and a fresh start, that was some 15 years ago, never heard from them again.
best regards
William Gaddis
PS Weren’t there more than #12–14 of newspaper’s Fire the Bastards? I’ve got them somewhere, unsure where, Green might too. I will look meanwhile. Coincidence if such it is with Univ. Nebraska (Press), I heard some 20 years ago that the poet Karl Shapiro was going to devote an issue of Prairie Schooner which he then edited to The Recognitions, he abruptly left the editorship or the University or both & that ended that.
Robt Giroux: distinguished American editor (1914–2008), at Harcourt, Brace from 1940 to 1955, thereafter at FSG (as it’s known in the trade). “I had a hell of a time getting it through the Harcourt hierarchy,” he later recalled, “but Donald Brace okayed it” (quoted in Ted Morgan’s “Feeding the Stream,” Saturday Review, 1 September 1979, 43). Giroux included WG on a list of the ten authors whose first books he was proudest to have discovered and published (see Donald Hall’s “Robert Giroux: Looking for Masterpieces,” New York Times Book Review, 6 January 1980, 3, 22–24).
ugly paperback: Harcourt, Brace & World reprinted R in cloth in May 1964 and brought out a trade paperback edition (under the Harvest imprint) in 1970.
Skeleton Key: Green’s work—modeled, WG is suggesting, on Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to “Finnegans Wake” (1944)—was abandoned in 1980. wrote The Romantic Agony: the distinguished Italian critic Mario Praz (1896–1982).
more than #12–14: no; WG is perhaps thinking of issue #11, a thirty-two page “Quote-Précis” of the novel.
To John and Pauline Napper
Wainscott, NY 11975
15 December 1981
Dear John and Pauline.
Your affectionate thoughts must have touched down upon me over this past year & more since however I continue to rant against the world’s iniquities & unfathomable stupidities life has gradually settled down to offer me a good deal of warmth & satisfaction as my 59th looms just 2 weeks hence.
First Muriel the constant companion & blessing undisguised, we are mainly out here at the chill tail end of Long Island where a fair number of friends from other days seem to have settled, spent some time last year in Mexico & will again this coming Feb-March largely for the weather, & the escape that gives me little choice but to sit down at this terrible machine & try to get on from page 99 to 100 (as I managed this morning) even when I think I’ve been working well I look back over a month or 2’s pages completed & am appalled at how few they are, another novel not a crusade this time like its 2 predecessors but simply, I hope, a ‘romance’ of sorts, its progress I can’t say slowed by lack of conviction but clearly coloured by a sense of futility from the fortunes of the 2 books before it, craft not art this time, filling a contract & for the moment some Guggenheim fellowship money to carry it forward (and oh ’tis comfort small, To think that many another lad has had no luck at all!)
Speaking here of Shropshire I was shocked thinking of you with this morning’s paper reporting heavy snows & –13°, so even more the credit to your work going well. Simplify! Simplify! says Thoreau & I too wish I could see it, now with the conviction that one’s later life is spent in undoing the complications so enthusiastically devised by the earlier—though of course I suppose that’s what The Recognitions was all about anyhow so perhaps all that distinguishes us from the machines is their ability to learn from their mistakes, the Jack Gold movie phantasy now long laid to rest.
The kids I must say though remain the best investment for these flagging years, Sarah & Peter as filled with good works & diligent cheer as from the start (they’ve come back to the east coast after 2 years of California, have your Cat hanging over their fireplace); Matthew among piecemeal film jobs in New York & quite as filled with indignation generally distributed as I was at that age & a future as unpredictable; but looking round me at other family situations I certainly count my blessings there.
There are places we want to go but as always God knows when, I did finally decide (& may have written you of it then) that I must see the Acropolis before moving out & we managed that what must be 2 years ago; & repeating Mexico may be too easy but I feel I’ve finally got to clear this job up & trust its ambience as sympathetic. And England? again, the Lord knows. It would be odd indeed to move out never having seen Shropshire! where it is at the least good to know you are thriving all things considered, with the hope that this may reach you in time enough to bring to you both warm affection from us all for the holidays & the inevitable new year,
Willie
and oh [...] at all!: from #28 of Housman’s Last Poems (1922).
Simplify! Simplify! says Thoreau: in the second chapter of Walden; the Town Carpenter echoes Thoreau’s advice in R (411, 441), as does Crawley in J R (449).
Matthew among piecemeal film jobs: in the 1980s Matthew worked on My Dinner with Andre, Crackers, Alamo Bay, God’s Country, and The Suicide Club.
To Steven Moore
[Green refused me permission to reprint Fire the Bastards! in In Recognition of William Gaddis and was outraged that I had already begun preparing his work for publication without first securing his permission. (I hadn’t known of his whereabouts, or whether he could even be located.) See the introduction to the Dalkey Archive edition for further details.]
235 East 73rd street
New York NY 10021
6 January 1982
Dear Steven Moore.
I’ve just had a note from Jack Green regarding your exchange of letters. Unfortunate in a way (I might have thought to write him myself first out of courtesy), means you cannot have the saga complete from the start, must I suppose open with such entrenched stupidity as Granville Hicks (parodied, among others, on pp. 515–6 of J R). However I can certainly see Jack’s point & of all people must honour it: his fierce intransigence & sense of integrity are of course what led him to take up cudgels on my book’s behalf these 27 years ago.
Next, responding to a question from you or Prof. Kuehl regarding my recollection of Jack Green, I think I said something like pre-hippie which, though in ways accurate enough, has by now too many pejorative implications & I do not wish to be so quoted. What is important to note is, should you now still plan any references to him, his indignation even then with the commercial ‘establishment’ (viz. his attacking those reviewers in those rather than coy literary terms, i.e. that they’d done poor to dishonest jobs & so should be fired) (my own feeling more recently for John Gardner’s J R review in the NY Review of Books); his taking out the Voice ad (which I trust you’ve seen) with his own funds & unbeknownst to me, legend to the contrary; & his subsequent supplying the numerous corrections—I’ve now no idea how many, perhaps upwards of 40 or 50—of typos, my own errors, dropped lines &c, which were incorporated in the Meridian (& English) editions & none since: in other words a serious champion not of me (as the bone in the jaws of today’s blurb world has it but of course may have always: have you ever come across Amanda Roos’
Bayonets of Bastard Sheen?), but of a piece of work.
(Though, for a diversion, how in heaven’s name can be explained the New Republic’s embrace of so pitifully awkward, vulgar, artless, amateurishly (in the pejorative sense) egregious (do.) an item as A Confederacy of Dunces, as “one of the finest books ever written”! & again, ! ! ! ! ! The more things change &c. . .)
I’ve got some questions here from Kuehl which I hope to do some blunt kind of justice to before leaving in 3 weeks for a couple of months during which I wish you good luck with your enterprises,
with best regards
William Gaddis
PS it did occur to me, in the realm of perverse self promotion (as the item itself clearly is), should you find useful for cover? jacket? illustration/design &c purposes (as opposed to Knopf’s bleary snapshot) for your collection of pieces on my work, to suggest the line ‘drawing’ included in Burt Britton’s Self Portrait / Book People Picture Themselves (Random House 1976, paper) which apparently Kuehl hadn’t seen; preferably as is but should there be copyright threat I could send you a repeat ‘original’.
Amanda Roos’ Bayonets of Bastard Sheen: Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939) is celebrated for being a terrible writer; Bayonets is a book of extracts from her letters, privately printed by T. S. Mercer in 1949.
A Confederacy of Dunces: posthumously published first novel by John Kennedy Toole (1937– 69), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980; reviewed by Phelps Gay in the 19 July 1980 issue of the New Republic (who called it one of the “funniest” books ever written, not “finest.”) WG later had a change of heart and praised portions of the novel in AA (63–66).
Burt Britton’s Self Portrait: in the end, WG supplied a version of the same drawing for the cover of In Recognition.
To Tomasz Mirkowicz
New York NY 10021
9 January 1982
Dear Tomasz Mirkowicz.
I received your card and message this morning and of course in view of what we read in the papers here of conditions in Poland was very happy to hear from you.
Anders is probably back among you & so has let you know of our very pleasant relaxed visit with him in the country & that I found the magazines he brought along most intriguing, even to seeing the page of Gibbs’ notes meticulously translated and pasted up in Polish!
To your query regarding arrangements for an edition in Polish of The Recognitions, our picture at this moment of the situation there is unclear enough that I might imagine for all your generous intentions circumstances have changed since you sent your proposal. I can only say now therefore that should it still be possible to work out I would have no objection whatever to payment in ‘blocked’ zlotys, if you will only when the time comes let me know the amount involved (a matter which I know is not in your control).
My only request would be this: that on the chance some other member of my family might find it possible to visit Poland when I might not, that such an account be set up so that could be drawn upon by not only myself but any of the following who might show up first:
Matthew Gaddis; Sarah Gaddis Conley; Muriel O Murphy.
The prospect of my work appearing there is rather a marvelous one to me (as has been even its following in English) and I greatly appreciate all of your efforts. You must know that through the haze of confusion here about conditions in Poland day to day, we think of you often and hope that your own lives and work are going on as well as can be possible and how greatly we admire your spirit in these difficult times.
Finally I should note that given uncertainties about the mail situation between us, and when you will receive this, we plan to leave New York at the end of the month for February and March in Mexico and that should you write me again late this month I might not have your letter till we return in early April.
very best wishes & regards
William Gaddis
conditions in Poland: martial law had been declared a month earlier. Mirkowicz hid Warsaw Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak in his apartment for a while.
Anders: as noted earlier, Jarosław Anders’s translation of a section of J R appeared in Literatura na swiecie.
To John R. Kuehl
[The cover letter to Gaddis’s answers to the questions Kuehl and I had set for him. Disappointed at the brevity of the interview, we decided against including it in our book and offered it instead to John O’Brien for his special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (vol. 2, no. 2 [Summer 1982]), where it appears on pp. 4–6 (and currently at the Dalkey Archive website).]
12 January 1982
Dear John Kuehl.
While not as detailed as you might wish, I trust that the enclosed will serve your purpose (taking you at your word to write ‘as little or as much’ &c). For your information (3,4) I have little enthusiasm right now for reviving the Lampoon period, didn’t know John Hawkes at college, believe I had an English survey course under Guerard but nothing beyond that. Items like (10) I’d leave to the critics, the kind of question for which I simply don’t have an offhand answer & the full & real one would just take too much entirely distracting time which is the problem with all these things, somebody else now after me wanting to publish an interview I gave to a Pole & it all just breaks up the day the mind & the work, however much I appreciate your interest & efforts.
Incidental to that, I wrote John O’Brien/Review of Contemporary Fiction that no, I didn’t want anything published from work in progress right now & no, I couldn’t send him a critical piece right now either. But I wouldn’t mind at all if you wanted to share any of the enclosed with him, quite up to you of course (I didn’t mention such a thing to him). We’re leaving in early February so I hope this wraps things up.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
(3,4): questions 3 and 4 concerned WG’s Harvard years: his work for the Harvard Lampoon, whether he met John Hawkes while there, and whether he studied under the prominent critic Albert Guerard (1914–2000).
(10): regarding the impact of The Waste Land on R.
To John and Dorothy Sherry
[From a popular tourist destination in central Mexico, accompanied by a newspaper article entitled “Older American Corps Draft Proposed.”]
Terraplin, 5
San Miguel de Allende
Gto. [Guanajuato], Mexico
[February or March 1982]
NEWS FROM SANDY DELL: DRAFT DODGE HAVEN FOR THE ‘GOLDEN OLDIES’
Thanks for your cheerful letter—cheery that is in light of ice & elbows, oh dear. Joints are too tricky; as for the sling I had the 6 weeks of that as you recall & can sympathize with that outrage.
Tempting fate here, I’ve no misfortunes to report. It is in fact all just glowing. Caught up with your fast set—Kimballs &c—who send best wishes & we’ve had a little wine&dining back & forth. Marc & consort quite mellow which is another warm note here. And even a Peter Glenville evening, most most elegant, 2 tables of real swells & most of the conversation about murderers everyone seems to know (Claus & Sunny, Mrs Harris’ doctor &c)—no way in our modest digs we can repay in kind especially the touch of taking the resident live duck around to tell everyone goodnight . . .
I have a nice tan which is not what the Guggenheim folks had in mind financing; what they did have in mind proceeds at a more glacial pace than any in memory though I am at it every morning & most late afternoons. [...]
And so, as we prepare for our annual Sunday pm backyard cookout for some of the above mentioned, the sky takes on a real South Fork grey, the air chills, and we say goodbye from Sandy Dell. Our best to Carol & Lucia, that is a very hard one as we know from our own; but we’ll see you all soon, back to NY the 29th March & Wainscott soon thereafter. Tell Carol her Clinique benisons were received with squeals here.
love from us both & all
W—
Kimballs: unidentified.
Peter Glenville: English actor and director (1913–96), who owned a second home in San Miguel de Allende.
Clau
s & Sunny, Mrs Harris’s doctor: socialite Claus von Bülow was tried in 1982 for the attempted murder of his wife Sunny; his original conviction was later overturned. School principal Jean Harris made national headlines in 1980 for murdering her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, author of the best-selling Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet (1979).
Carol & Lucia: Carol Phillips (1922–2006), a former editor at Vogue, founded Clinique (skin-care products) in 1968. She was a close friend of WG until his death. Lucia Haile was her sister.
To John R. Kuehl
[To thank WG for the interview, Kuehl and I sent him a coffee-table book on Flemish art. He sent me a letter almost identical to this one.]
Wainscott NY 11975
20 April 1982
Dear John Kuehl.
Simply a note to thank you for the marvelously thoughtful gift from yourself & Steven Moore waiting for me when I returned from Mexico: those pictures do one after another of them recall an intense time in my life (What only youth could mount, and folly ride . . . if I have it about right).
I understand incidentally that, somehow subliminally, Avon has anticipated imminent activity by printing 5000 more of their bad fat little edition this time to go at $5.95. Perhaps some day my children will see that 1973 advance earned back.
Needless to say I look forward with some curiosity to the various fruits of all your efforts ahead,
best regards & thanks again
William Gaddis
from Mexico: at this point in his letter to me, WG added: “particularly when I’ve felt that you might have found me less responsive to all of both of your efforts on my work’s behalf than might have been hoped.”
What [...] ride: see note to 24 May 1980.