Well, speaking of that here’s an item. (CONFIDENTIAL FOR NOW) Louis Auchinloss wants to write a piece on my work (& me) for the NY Times Magazine. I know that MHG will howl & you may too! Everything I’ve always avoided, shied from, a few ‘personal details’ &c. HOWEVER. 1) He is a class act, not a celebrity junk journalist a la Vanity unFair, real probity, novelist & lawyer, steeped in the world of class, money, Edith Wharton’s world, WASP forthright generous aristocrat & I say all this not for its social cachet but for his crisp approach ‘nothing in it for him’, not using me to build his reputation nor his to build mine & not the ‘celebrity’ trip. It springs from his strong feeling that J R is one of the great novels in its preoccupation with $/USA & his wish (demand!) that it reach a wider audience, rescue it from the academic critics & deliver it to the Middle Class which the NYT Magazine reaches. By the 100 thousands. 2) In the next few months you know I will be offering this next novel (sketch & outline) for a new contract somewhere & a piece such as his could raise the stakes a good deal on the advance, deliver me from being an ‘intellectual’, ‘writers’ writer’, PhD material &c, to the wider audience they seek. (Also one cannot discount the possibility of the illiterate movie people seeing its promise for their $$$ ends.) + his assurance of nothing in the piece I do not want there, which is also to say that you (or MHG) do not want there, so we have time to sort out anything from “He has a daughter who has been living and studying in Paris in recent years” to “While Mr Gaddis takes evident satisfaction in his work, his real pride is reserved for his children. His lovely daughter Sarah, residing in Paris, is completing a much talked about novel already signed with Alfred Knopf, which . . .” (Exactly the stuff Louis would never write but) whatever will make sense to you, point being whatever emerges that your (& MHG’s) accomplishments are your own which is true. Anyhow I do honestly think that the time of being the reclusive unapproachable writer is not only over but to press it on could very well appear as a coy play for attention, NOT that you’ll see me (us) playing tag in People magazine. Certainly I was reclusive for years & for damned good reason but this seems a time simply to be forthright & here the point which is essential is that Louis is concerned with the work itself, not with cute. It’s a matter of a few months & I’ll keep you informed.
And now this (imagine our correspondence gradually becoming writerly exchanges about publishing?): NEWS: Elisabeth Sifton has just left Viking. For KNOPF. And of course I’m a writer she’d like very much to take with her. You’re there. Mehta was strong for Carpenter’s Gothic. Gottleib’s OUT. All pretty wild. I don’t expect to make any move for 3 or 4 months & will discuss every step with you beforehand but good Lord at last we may be coming out on top! & again, most primarily & to be preserved for the truth it is as individuals, you for your own efforts & talents, MHG for his, me for mine, & everything I can do to shun the danger you may both see as prospering ‘in my shadow’, ie the kind of crap that the cheap press loves.
To other matters, will you be able to get away from Paris this summer? If not for a long stretch at least for long weekends (taking your work with you), I hope so. I can remember Paris in August as sweltering heat; but of course you have the Bois so it’s not like being locked up in the rue Dauphine where I was.
Out now to lay in a few groceries for the promised appearance of Julia driving out with MHG today or tomorrow wishing of course that you were here now that things have settled down. But our real settling down is I guess settling down to work again, mine the problem of getting started and yours of finishing which is what I would urge upon you, finishing one complete draft even if there are a few rough spots since you can always go back & put things in/take things out but there is a great sense of satisfaction getting that first draft done. However we all work at our own rates & I know there’s no telling someone else what & how to do it, as I know you will.
much love
Papa
desolation of every town along the way: see headnote to 24 October 1933.
Pennington: Sarah lived in Pennington, NJ, during her first marriage.
Saul [...] Sigrid: Saul Steinberg (see headnote to WG’s second letter of 21 January 1990) and his partner, photographer Sigrid Spaeth.
Louis Auchinloss: American novelist, lawyer, and historian (1917–2010). “Recognizing Gaddis” appeared in the New York Times Magazine, 15 November 1987, and was reprinted (with new material) as “William Gaddis” in his The Style’s the Man: Reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Vidal, and Others (Scribner’s, 1994), 11–25.
MHG: Matthew Hough Gaddis.
Julia: Julia Murphy, Muriel’s daughter.
To Donald Oresman
[On the same day, WG sent a letter similar to this to his friend Judge Pierre Leval, for whom see headnote to 10 August 1993.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
6 August 1987
Dear Donald.
Since your kind letter in May I have finally got back to this item with a good deal of juggling around, and even wonder if some of it, in the interests of ‘technical correctness’ has made it a little the less ‘vivid’ (as you warn). Nonetheless there were some major points to be addressed such as ‘temporary restraining order’ and ‘preliminary injunction’ and ‘summary judgment’ which I think I’ve now got straight. By happy chance for the last of them (summary judgment) Saul Steinberg passed along to me a copy of his just obtained against Columbia Pictures promoters distributors & advertisers for copyright infringement using his well known New Yorker’s myopic view of America poster in promoting a movie called Moscow on the Hudson (Opinion by U.S.D.J. Louis L. Stanton) so lucidly written that I lifted those portions bodily.
Still I’m sure there are still enough errors for a reversal on appeal (as intended), particularly the citations (do they correspond to Virginia law? &c, a couple of lawyers suggested I get the Harvard Blue Book but I’ve refrained), but I did find a paperback (Scribner’s) Law Dictionary. And there’s still enough evidence of an aging judge who immensely enjoys the sound of his own writing, parody run-on sentences &c though whether he ‘takes judicial notice’ too often (& incorrectly) I’m not sure.
And why didn’t plaintiff’s lawyers claim Cyclone 7 as a protected statement under the 1st Amendment? Well that will be the issue when it all gets to the Supreme Court (where this aged judge will just have been seated & a la Renquist refuses to recuse himself) later in the novel if we ever get there. (At that point Mr Szyrk wants the thing removed since he’s sold it to Holland for a Holocaust memorial, & the Village demands to keep it since it has become a big tourist attraction.) And so now I am simply trying to get down to the real novel itself for which this is simply an appendix though constantly tempted elsewhere, such as an action for defamation and infringement by the Episcopal church v. Pepsi-Cola claiming the latter is an anagram of Episcopal &c&c&c . . .
I hope you are well, meanwhile this may provide diversion and of course any blue pencilling would be a welcome, as you suggest & if so inclined.
warmest regards,
Bill Gaddis
Cyclone 7: a steel structure by an artist named Szyrk at the center of these legal battles in FHO.
Renquist: William Rehnquist (1924–2005), seated on the Supreme Court in 1986. Judge Crease doesn’t make it that far in the novel.
Episcopal church v. Pepsi-Cola: unfortunately, WG didn’t finish this subplot for FHO.
To Steven Moore
[I had sent WG a draft of what would eventually be published as chapter 1 of my William Gaddis, asking him to vet it for any factual errors regarding his biography and requesting permission to quote from his writings and letters.]
[Wainscott, NY 11975]
2 August 87
Dear Steven Moore.
To yours of 17 July: yes, permission to quote the passages you note (though I think footnote 20 should be ascribed simply to Thos Mirkowicz, Miss Logan simply sat in, ‘observed’, later wanted to publish the whole thing in the US as I’d expressly ruled out.)
r /> Other items from a quick scanning:
bottom of p3, I’d already entered Harvard when war broke out, simply stayed there
last line some 2 years for little over a year
p4 line 3, I still feel this pressure of trying . . . for I still have this trying below: What lines from Junkie?
p5 bottom, some raw material for the raw materials (really very little) p10 I should have said Elizabethan drama
p14 your interesting emphasis on Firbank; Henry Green yes but not CPSnow, the most wooden fiction I’ve ever encountered
p16 Hawthorne, better assumptions: the Blithedale (sp?) Romance and a story I believe called the Artist of the Beautiful. And quite a good deal more of Twain, Christian Science comes to mind, many short (journalistic) pieces as on King Leopold’s Congo, late story about a man unsure whether he’s on a ship dreaming of home or vice versa. Certainly Tom Sawyer.
p.18 why limit Shakespear to those 2 (& ‘perhaps’ even Lear!)? Most of Shakespear certainly, favourite is still As You Like It.
p22 I don’t recall the ‘none of us grew &c’ as J R’s company, simply saw it pass on a truck one day
I don’t know regarding quotes from the books, you might ask Viking’s Permissions dept (remind them I own rights to first 2 & give my permission). But I should think the ‘fair use’ rule must still apply provided the quotes aren’t too long, ie tending toward the body of the piece, & are for fair critical purposes.
Finally no to taking time for a short critical piece & for now don’t especially want the PEN reprinted.
Also have got to tell you that when in Budapest last year an interview with an American Literature scholar named Zoltan Abady-Nagy which turned out well & has filled the hole for the nagging Paris Review, next spring perhaps? Not critical as your work but informed & got the thing out of the way.
Yours,
WG
2 years for little over a year: his time at the New Yorker. The magazine’s personnel department had informed me that WG worked there from 26 February 1945 until 29 April 1946.
Junkie: in R, a character identified only as the “attractive girl with the Boston voice” recommends Benzedrine in the exact same words as the character Mary in William Burroughs’s novel Junkie (1953). Cf. R 631 and 640 with the Penguin edition of Junky (1977), 14.
raw material: I had written that WG’s jobs in industry in the late 1950s and 1960s provided the raw materials for J R.
Elizabethan drama: he had said “Jacobean” drama in his interview with Miriam Berkley, from which I was quoting.
CPSnow: I was listing British writers whom WG had read, not necessarily those who influenced him.
better assumptions: I had speculated on what Hawthorne WG may have read (The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun have been cited by other critics). The rest of this paragraph refers to my listing of other American writers WG had read.
Shakespear: as a result of his “quick scanning” WG misread this paragraph: I was not listing all the Shakespeare plays he had read, but arguing that his work belongs to the same tradition of vitriolic satire that included (among Shakespeare’s works) Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, and perhaps King Lear.
short critical piece: I was guest-editing a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction entitled “The Novelist as Critic” and invited WG to contribute an essay, or—if he couldn’t take the time to write something new—to allow me to publish his 1986 PEN address “How Does the State Imagine?” (RSP 123–26).
To Louis Auchinloss
[For his New York Times Magazine piece, WG sent him In Recognition of William Gaddis, Aldridge’s American Novel and the Way We Live Now (which reprints his J R review), other reviews, a corporate speech, and “Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount et al.”]
Wainscott, New York 11975
23 August 1987
Dear Louis.
If you haven’t tossed out the whole noble notion of rehabilitating J R for the ‘general public’, I risk discouraging you further with this self serving bundle where you may find something useful.
Item: book of essays, the first 19pp with more biographical material than I’d have wished, essays 8, 11, 12, 13 may be the most pertinent.
Item: book by critic John Aldridge, pp 46–52.
Item: batch of reviews, from the scathing reception of The Recognitions through the kinder welcome given the next 2 books (though see ‘George Steiner’ in the New Yorker).
Item: the only corp. speechwriting I’ve come up with for Eastman Kodak reproduced in this brochure (& they always paid within ‘5 business days’).
Item: simply for your own passing entertainment, as I would hope, a crude tribute to your other profession in the form of a judicial Opinion, one of many projected for my present novel in the works; also for the fact that the part justifying summary judgment (pp 3,4) is lifted bodily (I understand these Opinions are ‘public property’? though perhaps it should have a citation?) from the case of artist Saul Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures et al. for pirating his New Yorker’s well known myopic view of the USA in advertising a dumb movie, found for plaintiff by U.S.D.J. Louis L. Stanton & I now learn to be your cousin! (The New Yorker interested in taking it.)
Back to J R which incidentally came out 2 or 3 years before the desecration of television’s Dallas in J.R. Ewing’s vicious greed, as contrasted to (with?) the original J R’s cheerful innocent hunger. He may incidentally reappear on the scene in a fall NYTimes Book Review business book issue, these years later now age 23 working for the Department of the Budget explaining this Administration’s policy to a Congressional Hearing committee. His was after all the original ‘Reaganomics’.
Have you still an appetite for this most generous proposal? and especially in the light of a hoped for minimum of ‘human interst’ (ie about ‘me’) as opposed to the books themselves—though I suppose there’s something to be said for my teaching a course at Bard College in the late 70s on The Theme of Failure in American Literature . . .
warm wishes to Adele from us both,
W G
Dallas: popular TV series that ran from 1978 to 1991.
fall NYTimes Book Review: “Trickle-Up Economics: J R Goes to Washington” appeared on p. 29 of the 25 October 1987 issue; reprinted in uncut form under its original title “J R Up to Date” in RSP (63–71).
Adele: Auchinloss’s wife.
To Sarah Gaddis
Wainscott
17 Sept. 87
Dear Sarah.
What a great treat to hear your report of Deauville, not only for the high life part of it but essentially what sounded in all you said like a further grasp at what we’ve called taking over your own life & the self esteem that must be a part of that: & so, so fitting that it should crown a birthday! one of the best you’ve had. Which brings in the negative note you’ve brought in a few times talking about the ‘jealousies’ & lacks of generous attitude toward your well-earned good fortune you’ve felt among some people around you. Well, there’s nothing to be done about it, just that feeling of disappointment that’s hard to shake off. For the most extreme example in my own life of course I cite Martin; our last contact was many months ago & I finally just decided damn it all, he has always looked at the underside of any (well-earned!) good fortune of mine, never had a good word for either J R or the last one (& only for the first one because of what he considers his own monumental ‘contributions’ to it), I don’t even know that he’s read them; point is there’s nothing to be done or gained so why go on with it? These things do eat away at one if we let them so the best we can do is to try to have learned something, to rescue that & cross the rest out.
Now: regarding the assortment enclosed, [...] Next a piece of rabid nonsense from Esquire picturing the world you are entering as a starry universe (I get in there under Leo, the Hamptons & Ursae Majoris) (but alas not Comets), the whole thing designed to inflame exactly what we talk about above (envy, jealousy &c).
& finally the Szyrk Opinion (not in fina
l form, a good many alterations needless to say made on the phone yesterday with Linda A who has been terribly concerned about the dog’s fate so I’ve supplied a sort of life support system for it—little does she know that later in the book lightning will strike Cyclone 7 & all America will greet Spot’s demise ‘with an outpouring of grief’ . . .). I hope it amuses you.
Anything else is a footnote to our talk on the phone. The Schnabel business is all pretty wild & wait till you see the thing! I’m already anticipating unkind remarks from colleagues, if it appears somewhere, re someone (me) who has always kept privacy (avoided Elaine’s) suddenly going public —to say nothing of Louis A’s piece if they use it . . . (Again imagine Martin seeing the Schnabel! that I had surely finally sold out!) But simply enough, with negotiating for another contract on the next book coming up, why not?
Certainly you can relax about all that for a while, you’ll have plenty of time & I’m sure many changes of mind between now & your publication date. I haven’t talked with Candida (ie ‘interfered’) but hope you have some progress ($) on the English deal. I have just got a copy of Carpenter’s Gothic in Swedish (titled Träslott, whatever that means) so sent one along to Torsten. I mean who else can read it?