235 East 73 Street
New York, New York 10021
4 January 1986
Dear George.
Regarding this ‘interview’ affliction: in this gap since discussing it for Paris Review back in the spring I got into a serious such encounter with a scholarly fellow extremely familiar with my work this past November in Budapest. He is Zoltan Abadi Nagy, & has got together some 45 pp (say 10,000 wds) which seem to me as good as could be done in this area for which you know I haven’t great enthusiasm & would like to get off once for all.
He plans its publication in Hungarian & is of course interested in possibilities for its publication here; thus this query whether it would serve Paris Review’s purposes since I would obviously be greatly relieved at this solution, or otherwise to find its US publication elsewhere & let the whole thing rest for another 10 years. [...]
We are here (988-1360) through February, then a month’s march through Australia before another damned spring & summer & hope even to see you, with love to Freddie,
& best regards,
Gaddis
Zoltan Abadi Nagy: properly, Zoltán Abádi-Nagy (1940– ), a translator and professor at Kossuth University in Debrecen, Hungary, also a visiting professor at several American universities over the years.
Freddie: Freddy Esty Plimpton, George Plimpton’s wife at the time (divorced in 1988).
To John and Pauline Napper
New York NY 10021
“Easter Sunday” [30 March] 1986
Dear John & dear Pauline,
why it has taken me this long to get any sort of note off to you I don’t know, especially since so much recent time has gone to simply staring at blank pages, at walls, at ‘old notes’ for hope of some kindling spark for another novel, another book & even the why of that escapes me after the carousal we’ve had over the winter: a ‘writer’s conference’ in Russia last November (COLD) & then England in February for the ‘media’ some fragment of which might have reached you. Activities I’ve always avoided in my own country: 40seconds on BBC television, 55 on radio, interviews in the ‘print media’ . . . all of it set up by the Book Marketing Council there & seemed politic since both earlier books were being republished & the new one appearing at the same time, so there went the better part of a week on such activities every minute accounted for put up, meanwhile, in great comfort at a swank little hotel called the Marlborough Crest, heated towel racks & fresh fruit & a trouser presser, things like that near the British Museum; at any rate I called you a couple of times that week at the number I have, no answer but no liberty on my part even if I had reached you, & cold. Even the newspapers (which I found appalling! my old favourite Daily Mail? the Express?) headlining COLD. So on the Thursday where to of all places but East Anglia for a ‘conference’ which proved academia to be quite the same everywhere, & COLD. Having planned to go from there for a couple of days to Cambridge the results came down with a rousing cold for Muriel so we fled back to London where she recovered while I came down with the worst throat I can remember, 2 days there among the heated towel racks & home where I went to bed for a week, something I haven’t done since childhood & why I didn’t even try to reach you those last days when I’d dared to envision (before we came over) gamboling on the heaths (?) & moors (?) of Shropshire with you for a couple of days but we’d be lying at the bottom of your garden now if we’d tried it. You seemed near but very far away & it finally seemed kinder to all simply to beat it for home, why they scheduled such an event for that time of year, why 30° in London (let alone East A.) is like 10° here . . . but the BMC people & publishers were so attentive & generous & I hope if only for their sake that we sold some books.
Carpenter’s Gothic has done quite well here for such a book despite numerous misreadings by our reviewers & critics even the favourable ones, mainly I think what it did for me was to bring me along as a real living novelist from having been viewed (when I was viewed) as a rather eccentric recluse who’d once written a couple of long very difficult books all which simply means that we get invited to Functions & patronize a few millionaires & otherwise the problems, the central problem of the work itself remains. I read so much of the current stuff & despair. A couple of nights ago met a lawyer (millionaire) who may be able to get me a cheap set of the Corpus Juris Secundum which is kind of a Reader’s Digest of the Law, every sort of case & human foible & precedent & plot one might imagine so there may be a spark somewhere there & enough reading to see me well through the Twilight Years (it is 100 volumes).
Well as you must know I have always admired what I’ve seen as your demand upon life to make itself worth pursuing & upon the work to make itself worth doing & however I may misread you this to me is the effort (Carpenter’s Gothic, as you may see, is unlike its predecessors which, in Samuel Butler’s phrase, ‘demanded to be written’, a willed book (fortunately the critics didn’t penetrate that though generations of PhD candidates to come may) so that is where we are now. Geographically though as the weather improves will get back out to Long Island, whisky still somewhat the problem but tobacco the abiding curse, that & late in life leisure? does one long for the panics of debt NO, No, no
love & best hopes & wishes,
Willie
Corpus Juris Secundum: WG received not this but the 81-volume American Jurisprudence, 2nd edition (1975), which provided the spark for what would become FHO. The millionaire lawyer was Donald Oresman (see next letter).
To Donald Oresman
[A New York attorney, art collector, and bibliophile (1926– ), at the time Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Paramount Communications. Over the next seven years WG sought legal advice from him for FHO.]
New York NY 10021
17 April 1986
Dear Donald,
I have read the Cardozo and dissenting opinions you sent to me over and over again, and immensely appreciate your trouble selecting these glimpses for me. How few pages they are for what they contain: the vistas of reason, language and rigorous speculation flung open by an otherwise inconsequential woman on a train platform buying a ticket for a completely inconsequential place. The man pursuing his cousin’s hat on the railway bridge is fine too, and again the language! (‘The risk of rescue, if only it be not wanton, is born of the occasion. The emergency begets the man.’ &c.) Much of my fascination clearly lies in the material itself, since the defining (and rampant evasion) of accountability seems to me central to our times.
Your efforts regarding Corpus Juris Secundum are also very greatly appreciated, and I would only urge ‘restraint’ (in the nonjudicial sense). Despite my grand declarations of that evening, I clearly will not survive the entire set, hardly need a recent edition and certainly not with the updating addenda, and any odd volumes you might come up with without further serious effort would be a pleasure. In fact, since I seem to have far more interst in civil than in criminal law, and in such areas as Liability, Risk, Negligence (though here is of course criminal negligence) and ‘the unswerving punctuality of chance’, I might be best suited to simply sit down and read your casebook on Torts from which you lifted these pages, for these wider evidences of what James called ‘the high brutality of good intentions’.
However all this comes out, you have again my warm thanks.
With very best regards,
Bill
Cardozo: Benjamin Cardozo’s opinion Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad (1928) is considered a legal classic, and is referred to twice in FHO (29, 579).
casebook on Torts: William L. Prosser et al.’s Cases and Materials on Torts, 7th ed. (Foundation Press, 1982), a classic text originally published in 1943, and the source for many of the legal citations in FHO.
‘the high brutality of good intentions’: title of an essay on Henry James by William H. Gass (1958; rpt. in Fiction and the Figures of Life, Knopf, 1970), and a phrase WG will continue to use occasionally.
To Clive Suter
[A student at Keele University in England who had se
nt WG his Master’s thesis, “God Damned Holy Shit: Wasteful Reproduction in William Gaddis’ J R” (1985).]
Wainscott, New York 11975
27 April 1986
Dear Clive Suter.
Thank you for your letter & the accompanying thesis. I do remember our meeting and your speaking of it what seems like a very long (& cold) time ago, & from reviews that have been sent me I gather that Carpenter’s Gothic has been quite well received which of course is pleasing.
I’ve given your thesis 2 readings with obvious enjoyment: it is a thesis with a thesis (which unhappily is not always the case, some of them I’ve seen mere laborious retelling of the ‘plot’). But in others such as this one I am always intrigued by what I learn, as for example the Marc Shell quote p. 3, marvelous. Your examination of Gibbs is I think awfully good &, again, rare (he is after all central to the book).
However not to pursue it point by point, the extremely well knit details & citations of your argument have absorbed me in this fascinating way: with the rise, or at least the rise in cohesion of the political right in America, my work has more frequently been characaterised as an assault on capitalism, with the unspoken implication of communism as its only alternative. What it comes down to, as some woman in a recent piece in Commentary touched upon, is whether in each system the abuses are inherent, or whether one or the other system is amenable to its abuses being corrected & therefore essentially sound. For communism, or rather the nearest approach to it on a visit to Soviet Russia last fall, I think the abuses are inherent and those of the totalitarianism it spawns inevitable; & I had thought that I thought, & that my work was directed at the abuses—& thus the (naive) hope of their correction—in our own system as essentially sound. However through reading your thesis here and now in the light, or perhaps the darkness, of ‘free enterprise’ totally unleashed by our present Administration, deficit ridden, corporate takeovers in the hundred millions which serve no productive purpose whatever, the widening gap between ‘private wealth & public squalor’ everywhere apparent (to say nothing of our Pentagon, NASA &c monsters), I have got to wonder, & that line ‘he builded better than he knew’ comes to mind, at least to keep the mind working for which I thank you. There’s a line somewhere in The Recognitions about the present constantly reshaping the past & this may be it.
with best regards,
William Gaddis
Marc Shell quote: “America was the historical birthplace of widespread paper money in the Western world, and a debate about coined and paper money dominated American political discourse from 1825 to 1845. [...] The paper money debate was concerned with symbolization in general, and hence not only money but also with aesthetics. [...] With the advent of paper money certain analogies, such as the one that ‘paper is to gold as word is to meaning,’ came to exemplify and to inform logically the discourse about language. For example a call was made by critics for a return to gold not only in money but also in aesthetics and language. [...] While a coin may be both symbol (as inscription or type) and commodity (as metallic ingot), paper is only (or virtually all) symbolic. Thus Wittgenstein chooses to compare meaningless sounds with scraps of paper rather than with unminted ingots” (Money, Language and Thought [Univ. of California Press, 1982], pp. 5–6, 18–19; Suter’s ellipses).
some woman in [...] Commentary: Midge Decter in the November 1985 issue, pp. 34–36. ‘he builded better than he knew’: see note to 13 June 1984.
present constantly reshaping the past: see note to Sheri Martinelli letter (Summer 1953?).
Top: Mario Vargas Llosa, William H. Gass, and WG at the PEN-sponsored 48th Worldwide Writers’ Congress, New York City, January 1986.
Bottom: WG (and Muriel Murphy behind him) and Steven Moore at the publication party for Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men, New York City, May 1987. (Both photographs © Miriam Berkley.)
To Steven Moore
[Two acquaintances of mine from New Hampshire, Clifford Mead and Richard Scaramelli, planned to visit me in New Jersey and wondered if I could arrange for the three of us to visit WG. In the postscript to my letter asking if a visit was feasible, I had asked, “Who in the world is Peter Taylor and what’s he doing with your PEN/Faulkner award?”—for much to my (and many others’) surprise, CG, though nominated, was passed over in favor of Taylor’s latest book, The Old Forest and Other Stories.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
25 May ’86
Dear Steve Moore.
The PEN/Faulkner award & ceremonies turned out to be, in my jaundiced northern eyes, something resembling the Southern Christian Readership Conference: 1 judge Texan; 1 Virginian; & Alice Adams fighting the good fight. Peter Taylor, whose work I didn’t know, all short stories apparently, a gentle elderly gent from Charlottesville &c. Made quite clear to us by m.c. Mississippian Hodding Carter that its whole thrust was to put Washington (a real southern town as I often forget till I revisit) on the culture map, shake off the yankee (NY) yoke. Uh huh.
To your real query: I am here with only occasional forays to NY & unpredictable at that. You’d all 3 be welcome to come out for lunch though it is a hell of a distance, if you call first (516-537-0743) we should be able to work something out here or possibly NY though I’ve no immediate plans for going into town.
yours,
W. Gaddis
Alice Adams: an acquaintance from WG’s Harvard days (see letter of 9 March 1947). The other two judges were Richard Bausch and Beverly Lowry.
Hodding Carter: W. Hodding Carter III (1935– ), Southern journalist and travel writer.
To Richard Scaramelli
[When Mead, Scaramelli, and I visited Gaddis on May 30th, Scaramelli dropped off a draft of a long article he had written on the school Gaddis attended as a boy and its director, John Kingsbury. Largely a historical account of the school, the essay contains a few conjectures on Kingsbury as a possible model for the Rev. Gwyon. During our visit, Scaramelli asked a number of questions about this period, and WG displayed an astonishing memory of names and incidents fifty-five years in the past.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
1 June 1986
Dear Richard Scaramelli.
That is quite a piece of homework, thank you for letting me read it. A few points:
p. 2,9 I think 7 rather than 8 years boarding there
p. 15 & passim, Mr Kingsbury was not a tall or big man though for his authority & stress on ‘doing it right’ a formidable figure for a small boy (you did not sit on the edge of your bed to tie your shoes, you sat on the chair; the bed was to lie down on & sleep). Looking back, I can see him as a very gentle man, no nonsense or sentimentality but not dour either, & as distant from cigars or schnapps as possible; religion was not a constant or oppressive presence let alone mythic meanderings, he saw things as they were. The ‘John H.’ is so far as I know coincidence. The 2 syllable/Kingsbury (p. 16) quite farfetched; & the 1883 date pure coincidence, as is (p. 17) the YMCA connection. He’d never (19) espouse false religion.
p. 18, further extreme coincidence: I hadn’t known till now of his earlier marriage, such things would never have been discussed before us (p. 19)
p. 22, the ‘preface’ draft was dropped because it was pretentious
pp. 25,6 The Whitford material news to me, do. (p. 31) Timothy Dwight though most amusing.
I hope you all got home before midnight.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
To Michael [——
Wainscott, New York 11975
13 December 1986
Dear Michael.
I’ve just learned of your illness which inevitably recalled me to mine some 50 (! I find hard to believe) years ago, 2 years of what was at last resignedly diagnosed as a ‘tropical fever of unknown origin’ (I’d then never been in the tropics), told I’d accumulated the most voluminous case history in New York Hospital, and finally sent home without prospects when I demanded that my dog be brought in for a visit; after which things gradually mended with no more explanation t
han what it was all about in the first place. Lord, when I remember those hospital days waking bright as a penny sitting bolt upright learning/ practicing Old English lettering doing Do Not Disturb signs for the nurses (& I still vividly recall in all of age 14’s confusion lusting after Miss McElvar, I see her now coming in for the night shift with a fling of red lined blue cape) and by evening a tempeature of around 103o & pains not generally earned till about age 80 . . .
At any rate, & since you’ve read The Recognitions, it’s all there (from page 41 on) written 12 or so years later as what, I wonder looking back, revenge certainly but perhaps not, as I must have meant it at the time, on the well intended medical blundering efforts, but on the gratuitous absurdity of the illness itself & equally, I must now suppose, of some glimpse of some part of the human spirit that refuses to accept it. Of course, as I note above, the actual (& equally gratuitous) solution was nothing as to the Heracles solution in the novel but it clearly did provide this material of innate indignation, indeed of human outrage at the accidental human condition & thus confirming its deterministic paradox that ‘everything happens for some reason’, in this case to produce ‘one more damned, thick square book’ of whatever merit but some sort of testimony, its reviews at the time notwithstanding.
Well I think of Mark Twain in his late dark years clinging to humour in its deepest sense as courage in its best, & doubt we can do better than that.
again with warm hopes & good wishes,
William Gaddis
To Judith Gaddis
[In his first letter to Judith since August 1980, WG enclosed this in a copy of CG, along with a note reading: “Some pain went into this as you will see but I hope it won’t recall enough of yours to spoil the ‘story’. No need to respond—it was, as they say (page 227) ‘the best I could do’—” After they separated, Judith moved to Key West, became involved in the arts scene there, was director of a small historic house museum, and eventually became a board member of the Key West Literary Seminar.]