Jovanovitch had taken over as President of HB as I recall barely weeks before the book came out in 1955; Eugene Reynal (sp?) who’d been trade books editor left, so did Robert Giroux. Jov. put in a dolt from the business side as trade editor & any effort for the book ceased. Despite his lack of any effort on the book’s behalf in the decades since, Jov. takes great pride in having been its publisher (it was of course practically in the stores by the time he took over), & his loyalty (=clinging to the rights) to it. Our correspondence ended a good many years ago, his on a fatuous, mine on an acrimonious note.
Now it’s faintly possible that something will be resolved (ie a reversion of rights) by the time your book is done & finds a publisher; for now however you may see that it’s not in my interest either to recall my rancour to Jov’s attention, or to stimulate—despite my gratitude for you & Kuehl’s efforts—enough interest in the book to prompt anyone to make a decent reprint bid to Harcourt thereby perpetuating my enslavement. (While Avon’s contract with HB licensing its reprint has expired they go right along peddling it, though changes at Avon too may let it drop.)
Yours,
William Gaddis
Devlin: at my request, John Devlin at Harcourt, Brace answered numerous questions regarding R’s publication history.
Tony Tanner’s long review: the eminent British critic Tony Tanner (1935–98) reviewed the Avon (not the Meridian) edition of R in the New York Times Book Review, 14 July 1974, 27–28.
how large the Meridian printing was: there were two printings, a first (March 1962) of 8,000 copies (with 2,000 unbound sets shipped to MacGibbon & Kee), and a second (September 1963) of 2,500.
la Pereze : i.e., Le perizie, which doesn’t mean “The Pilgrim” but “The Appraisals” or “Expert Testimonies.”
BOMC ed.: a Book-of-the-Month Club edition of R was remaindered in the late 1970s.
QPB: The Quality Paperback Club offered a paperback edition of J R.
Santa Barbara: probably Joseph the Provider, a rare-book dealer located in Santa Barbara and known for their high prices. (Due to financial necessity, I sold them this and my other Gaddis letters in the summer of 1991, much to WG’s chagrin.)
1 ad: Harcourt’s ad appeared in the 16 March 1955 issue of the New York Times, 31.
To Steven Moore
[Per his request, I sent WG a draft of my biographical introduction to In Recognition of William Gaddis. The page numbers and the phrases WG puts in quotes below are from this draft.]
Wainscott NY 11975
3 January 1983
Steven Moore: thanks for the look at your draft, here are some corrections & elaborations:
Page 4. Also the inevitable rumour that one is dead. Regarding the Pynchon reference (which may be what you refer to), there was a column by a well disposed man whose name I can’t recall, for years he wrote syndicated book reviews for AP, speculating that Gravity’s Rainbow might well be the long novel I’d been rumoured working on, & Pynchon & I the same person (but, Pynchon “as a young man”?).
8. “minor misunderstanding” might better be fracas, even frolic; about January ’45, & I did not stay on. Rather, since college regulations forbade anyone on probation taking part in extracurricular activities, it was the custom at the Lampoon to take a pseudonym in this situation (look at the mastheads, you’ll see some very odd names); thus I’d been on probation since the first time Ravenkil(l?) W. appears, and left promptly after the above incident not “anxious to develop talents &c” but simply to get a job. That was incidentally not as a ‘trainee’ but a ‘checker’; the checking dept at the NYer was (& is) serious stuff there.
9. top, a brief memoir? then, I honestly question that I wore my ‘unimpaired right arm in a sling’, but Vincent’s image is lively enough that I won’t argue. Incidentally again: nothing libelous in he ‘introduced her to drugs’? or ‘attempted suicide many times’? I don’t know that it really was many, or how real even those attempts were.
10. top, that printing press relegation seems to me quite far fetched. #2 that year in a monastery cell belongs back with the legends on p.4. I did indeed go out to the place with all sorts of dour & self absorbed intentions only to discover that they were well prepared for such intrusions: a comfortable room & meals at modest price & arm’s length from their devotions, I stayed about a week: thus Ludy (parody of a Readers Digest piece by AJ Cronin) & his ‘religious experience’.
11. That 1952 copyright notice has misled everyone. It should refer really only to the New World Writing extract; the book itself wasn’t copyrighted till publication. Then this: Catharine (not Catherine) Carver worked at Harcourt in some such capacity as copyreader but it was she who went through the MS exhaustively with meticulous queries &c. & fought for the book. You might check the PR masthead for whether she was formally their fiction editor, I know she did most of the drudgery work there & never got much credit for it. David Chandler was a college summer trainee, he did carefully review the MS with intelligent queries but quite secondarily to C.C. (The ‘editor’ in your note 19 is of course she.) Whether you want to hedge the typesetter item as ‘a story told’ is of course up to you, I had it as I say 2nd hand.
14. You will be interested to see Aldridge on J R in a forthcoming book The American Novel and the Way We Live Now, Oxford Univ. Press for April 83 publication.
15. bottom, leave Cowley in there as presenter if you want to, he did indeed hand me the envelop but I’m sure he hadn’t a clue who or what either I or the book was & don’t recall his reading the citation.
19. bottom, rather than ‘(mis)quoted by Gibbs’ you might want to say ‘drunkenly misquoted by Gibbs’; that’s where Steiner got to me, quoting some of Gibbs’ ranting as dialogue without mention he was drunk.
22. It was in fact McCarthy & Gass over Dolbier’s objections (he I believe wanted the Woiwode, even went so far as to dissociate himself from the decision in his provincial (Providence?) column).
22. I haven’t that acceptance at hand but am sure something, the latter part that makes contrast sense of it, has been dropped from the quote on Gorky, ie what happened after 1880.
23. middle, also in the Notes: I’m sure it’s Peter not David Koenig?
24. No offense, but to me ‘in-depth’ is right out of Whiteback’s lexicon along with ‘ongoing’.
NOTES: 13. For ‘short shrift’ you might see his reference in his review of Bert Britten’s (sp?) Self Portrait, Writers drawing themselves (& while at it, glimpse his drawing in the book).
23. I’m certain that Gill wrote not in Time (I don’t recall who did) but the (unsigned) item in the NYer’s Briefly noted fiction, a condescending dismissal reference to Shawn the Penman (Joyce apparently).
From your letter: I gather your request to publish items from my letters refers to those quoted in this text which is okay with me (Lord knows what I’ve written to others elsewhere); I’ve no objection to your publishing the essay (nor of course control) & don’t think any notice of either permission or disavowal is necessary.
Yours
William Gaddis
rumour: I had gathered many of the rumors circulating about WG, including the one that, after “failing” with R, he began writing under the pseudonym of Thomas Pynchon.
“minor misunderstanding”: I had thus described the circumstances under which WG had been asked to leave Harvard. Gaddis used the pseudonym Ravenkill Woodplumpton in the September and December 1944 issues of the Harvard Lampoon.
“a brief memoir”: I had used a different description of “In the Zone,” WG’s account of his days in Panama. The rest refers to his old acquaintance Vincent Livelli (1920– ), who sent me several letters recording his memories of WG, Eddie Shu’s influence on Sheri Martinelli’s drug use, and her attempted suicides.
printing press: Martinelli had a small printing press in her apartment, which reminded me that the retarded serving girl Janet in R also has her own press, on which she prints religious tracts. #2 refers to WG’s visit to a monastery i
n Spain.
AJ Cronin: See A. J. Cronin’s “What I Learned at La Grande Chartreuse,” Reader’s Digest, February 1953, 73–77.
PR: Partisan Review, where Carver was managing editor at the time.
Aldridge: pages 46–52 are a revision of his Saturday Review review of J R.
Cowley: the eminent critic Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) presented WG with a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters on 22 May 1963 (see letter of 10 May 1963 for the citation).
McCarthy & Gass: concerning J R’s National Book Award. Dolbier wrote an account of the NBA proceedings for the Providence Journal, 2 May 1976, H-33.
acceptance: I must have mistranscribed WG’s NBA acceptance speech: see In Recognition, pp. 15–16, for the complete (and accurate) text (rpt. in RSP 122).
Peter not David Knight: Peter Koenig, sometime after writing his dissertation on R, changed his name to David. (See WG’s asterisked note in his 7 April 1983 letter.)
‘in-depth’: my introduction ended somewhat abruptly, leading John Kuehl to add a concluding phrase using “in-depth,” a favorite adjective of Principal Whiteback in J R.
‘short shrift’: I believe I had echoed the postscript to WG’s letter to Steven Weisenburger of 18 September 1981 (which he had shared with me) and said Anatole Broyard gave short shrift to something or other of Gaddis’s. In his review of Britton’s Self-Portrait, Broyard wrote of WG’s line drawing: “William Gaddis is headless, his privacy either inviolable or inaccessible to him” (New York Times, 30 November 1976, 37).
Gill: I had carelessly written that Brendan Gill reviewed R in Time rather than the New Yorker, where he concluded: “this novel challenges the reader to compare it with Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’ So challenged, the reader is obliged to say that while Mr. Gaddis has been very brave, Shem the Penman has won the day.” (Shem and Shawn are brothers in Finnegans Wake.)
To June R. Cox
[American educator (1919–96), then Research Director of the Sid W. Richardson Foundation and researching her book Educating Able Learners: Programs and Promising Practices (Univ. of Texas Press, 1985), which quotes from the letter below on pages 18 and 27.]
235 East 73rd street
New York, NY 10021
24 January 1983
Dear Ms Cox.
I am sorry to be so long about answering your inquiry regarding my educational background as it might relate to my MacArthur Prize Fellowship. I’ve postponed it with the usual excuses but also I believe for reasons which may become more clear below in what may still not be an entirely satisfactory response for your purposes. While it occurs to me, first may I ask that none of the following in its personal details be released for ‘biographical’ purposes elsewhere, which I assume is hardly your purpose anyhow.
Inhowfar the course of my formal education shaped my later work I cannot say; and I believe one must be very much on guard against disproportionate inferences and emphases. My own experience was rather the reverse of the usual: I went off to boarding school age 5 or 6, then to public schools from 7th through 12th grade and thence to college. The boarding school was a small one, in Connecticut, run along lines of what was then described as the ‘modified Dalton plan’ implying a good deal of freedom but very strictly within a New England framework of imbuing one with a matter of fact acceptance of simply trying to do well what needs to be done; and of taking the responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. Its informal affiliation would have been Congregational. (My mother’s family till her generation were Quaker.) My grades were so far as I recall good; but since the climate was a noncompetetive one this was not stressed. Similarly, sports were organized little beyond the point of making them possible to take part in, and with no more of the competetive element than called for by the rules of the game.
High school was the general run of prewar uncrowded New York state public education emphasizing grades insofar as all courses were subject to the state regents examinations. My grades were good and occasionally excellent. Throughout school I never questioned doing homework on a regular assigned basis. I don’t recall ever being what you call a ‘recognized achiever’ although, since I was admitted to the only college I applied to (Harvard) presumably some of that element was present.
Harvard stressed one’s taking one’s courses, assignments, attendance at lectures &c very much upon one’s self. My marks were generally good; I was occasionally on Dean’s List. My only extracurricular activity was editing the Harvard Lampoon. I studied English literature and psychology. (At age about 14 I’d had a consuming ambition to be a chemist; it quite suddenly disappeared for no reason I knew, any more than why I’d been so consumed by it in the first place.) All out of the ordinary that coloured my high school experience was loss of about a year and a half with a severe illness. I was later obliged to take a year away from college with some after effects of the ‘cure’. My mother was especially supportive throughout; and right up the line I had to a very large degree supportive and generous teachers with none of whom I was especially intimate but remember many with great fondness. Taken together, it may well have been this atmosphere conducive to self regard—sometimes likely of course but not entirely deserved—which constituted the most fortunate aspect of my school years.
Reviewing the foregoing in the light—or perhaps rather the darkness—of the present day, it’s imperative to remain aware how those prewar days, the depression notwithstanding, were simpler times, before so many taken for granted values and obligations were sundered not to be recovered, or reinstituted today in my own strong opinion, in imitation of those earlier forms.
Next on the personal level, my college experience was clearly coloured by its taking place during the war where many or most of my friends were bound; my high school, by a long interruption of illness whose enforced isolation must certainly have indelibly coloured my private picture of the world and my place in it; and finally, private boarding school where by very definition the circumstances were as or even more formative than the teachers and curriculum.
May I say at risk of sounding rude—though the length of this response must belie any such intention—I’ve had a good number of lengthy questionnaires seeking most intimate (and often nonsensical) details in what I assume are well intentioned efforts to delineate by accumulation the ‘creative act’, ‘creative personality’ &c. I’ve tried to respond with a simple thank-you but never submitted to one partly, I’m sure, for feeling the futility of such enterprises but also out of concern for the fate of extrapolated information however well intended. Taken further, this could even apply to my experience of private boarding school and one of Congregational affiliation at that since, as we are well aware, both ‘private’ too frequently merely signifies exclusion of the disenfranchised (by reason of poverty, race &c); and ‘Congregational’, which is to say any cultural-religious designation, too often used to justify the perpetuation of entrenched beliefs and interests in face of the threat of inevitable change.
Thus in large part the education you inquire about has led me to feel, more strongly as I grow older, the futility—indeed, self destruction—of resistance to change as opposed to its painful embrace in an effort [to] help shape it rather than, all too human, control it. You ask ‘did school matter much one way or another?’ and of course it did: for an instance, the reading I did well out of college was more important than what I’d done in college but I should never have done it, or be doing it now, without all that had gone before. So it seemed to me then and it seems even more to me now that the main purpose of education from the start must be to stimulate questions—even those to which we’ve got no answer—rather than answering them; and to open every vista even those which are distasteful rather than closing them for that reason, only to see them gape open in their most destructive features later.
I hope that this will be of some use to you. Last week incidentally I met with Mr Champion Ward, who said he had discussed your project with you and was interested in the responses you have
had, and so I trust you’ve no objection to my sending a copy of this along to him.
Yours,
William Gaddis
modified Dalton plan: a concept developed by the American educator Helen Parkhurst (1887– 1973) in 1920, in which the curriculum is tailored to each student’s interests and abilities, and aims to develop social skills.
Champion Ward: F. Champion Ward (1910–2007), an educator who helped the MacArthur Foundation establish its “genius” awards.
To Steven Moore
[I had just learned from Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee’s Jack’s Book (St. Martin’s, 1978) that WG was the model for Harold Sand in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Subterraneans, from which I sent WG the relevant pages. (I also asked if he would autograph my first edition of R).]
New York NY 10021
19 March 1983
Dear Steven Moore.
Thanks for the Kerouac excerpt. No I didn’t know about ‘Harold Sand’ & haven’t read the Gifford/Lee book. And I was quite as unaware—at the time & till now—of Kerouac’s generous regard for me as it appears in these pages. I remember our acquaintance as very much the way he presents it right down to the old car (a black wounded 1941 Chevrolet) & centered very much around Alan Ansen. Kerouac’s picture of him (Bromberg) is right on. Ansen was an extraordinary fellow, marvelously without ‘consciousness of his fantastic impact on the ordinary’, & I’ve always felt it in a way unfair—though perhaps I’ve simply missed the reading—that he’s had so little credit given him as the mentor he was for this whole group, a man so hungry to share all he had. I cannot recall how we met but I spent many enough evenings (though I knew him only for approx. that year) of heavy talk & drink till 7am in that ‘library’ Kerouac describes; & with the date in place I believe this is how things went: with all his blinding erudition Ansen saw few happy prospects till, his father having died & then his remaining aunt quite abruptly, he came into that hideous house in Hewlett & a small income but one just large enough to allow him to visit Europe, something he was as hungry for as he was apprehensive about despite his thorough command of languages. I had The Recognitions in what I considered a finished draft but had ‘a little more work’ to do on it; & so, that fall of 1953, Ansen went to Europe (Venice) & I, for a ridiculous rent (I think $35 a month) & tending his mail, banking, bills &c, spent that winter alone in the house practically rewriting the entire book. I’d finished just as he returned in spring & remember him sitting down barely off the boat in that ghastly diningroom & reading it straight through in a day and a half. Like the others I’m in his unacknowledged debt. (Soon after, having got his confidence in handling expatriation, he rented or sold the house & returned abroad, settled on the Athens–Tangiers axis, has scarcely been back & I’ve never seen him since.)