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D’s Uncle’s Dream: an 1859 novella by Dostoevsky. (Prince K. is a senile aristocrat.) The quotations are from the beginning of chapter 2, in Constance Garnett’s translation (pp. 229–30 in The Short Novels of Dostoevsky [Dial Press, 1945], which Gaddis bought in his twenties).
To Peter Friedman
[A New York City attorney and a fan of WG’s fiction; having heard he was working on a novel about lawyers, Friedman wrote to offer any legal assistance he might need.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
30 July 1993
Dear Peter Friedman.
Thank you for your generous offer and most impressive (both in extent & legal bent) resume in connection with the morass of legal fiction I’d got myself into; however we may both probably count our blessings that it comes along too late or it might have taken another 5 years & thousand pages from both our lives.
As of today, under the title A Frolic of His Own (Joel v. Morrison, 1834, 6 C.&P. 501, 172 Eng.Rep. 1338) the entire 600+ pages of turmoil is in the hands of Poseidon / Simon & Schuster in the form of corrected galleys waiting to be cut & bound, packaged & remaindered over the months to come (publication date probably January ’94) & thank the Lord to have it out of my hands.
Quite contrary to the received opinion of legal language as purposely obfuscatory I had come to admire its tortuous (no pun intended) struggles for precision & contingency (“holding these rights in perpetuity throughout the world and elsewhere”), was handed Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad &, once hooked, on to Prosser & thence a gift of every human foible in AmJur’s all 84 vols. till finally a couple of years ago I sobered up to the fact that I was writing a novel of civilization & its discontents not a compendium of western law & finally surfaced a few months ago to my great relief & that of those around me albeit with decisions never to be reached & opinions never to be written. Which may be just as well.
At any rate I hope you will find the final product entertaining & perhaps even, as Conrad had it, with that little bit of truth we’d forgot to ask for.
Yours,
W. Gaddis
civilization and its discontents: title of a late work by Sigmund Freud (1930).
Conrad: from his preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897): “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.” WG quotes this passage in both J R (449) and FHO (363).
To David Ulansey
[A professor of philosophy and religion. His book The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World was published by Oxford University Press in 1991. The letter is damaged; the brackets enclose tentative reconstructions.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
30 July 1993
Dear David Ulansey,
most thoughtful of you to send me the copy of your Mithraic Mysteries which I’m now happily able to peruse at leisure rather than with the frantic research bent I’d have approached it those decades ago—1949 or so [having just] read Robert Graves’ White Goddess &c, [living] in Spain & embarked on what became The Recognitions, went up to call on Graves in [Deya,] (Mallorca) hoping for help in finding some [alterna]tive religion which a despairing rock bound [Protestant] preacher might turn to, a futile mission in that regard (Graves was still immersed in god & goddess & we somehow got off into the Salem witch trials) but the great treat of time spent with the man himself who became in a way, through his youthful enthusiasm, the physical model for Reverend Gwyon. At any rate I finally stumbled on what I thought the perfect vehicle in Mithraism & what seemed mercifully small amount of information on it but sufficient to my purposes probably all for the best since had your work been available I’d probably have become submerged & perhaps never surfaced. Thank you again,
Yours,
W. Gaddis
To Pierre N. Leval
[A jurist (1936– ) who had just been appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (New York, Connecticut, and Vermont), known in literary history for his role in J. D. Salinger’s case against Ian Hamilton’s use of quotations from the author’s letters in his forthcoming biography; Judge Leval found it within the bounds of fair use, but his decision was reversed on appeal, a finding WG supported. The “Beatrice” of the first sentence is unidentified.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
10 August 1993
Dear Pierre,
discussing the unreliability of the NY Times with Beatrice here over dinner last night but this morning’s edition does confirm the fine news she’d already given us of your elevation to the US Court of Appeals (“considered just a question of time” says the paper, indeed!) but we are not so blasé and find it most exciting and send our warmest congratulations.
It is even more impressive in the light of my own district court judge who dies on the eve of his confirmation for a seat on the appeals court at age 97 (‘an interim appointment’) in the book which is at last finished and going into print under the title A Frolic of His Own (Joel v. Morrison, 1834, 6 C.&P. 501, 172 Eng.Rpt. 1338); and it would have been appropriate to thank you for your generous interest and support on some sort of acknowledgment page but then I thought better of it since it must inevitably contain some legal howlers that would hardly reflect well on your good offices.
I will hope for the chance to see you out here before the summer is over, meanwhile Muriel sends her love and best wishes to you both and again, congratulations.
Bill
To Sarah Gaddis
14 August ’93
Dear Sarah,
I have your letter & I know you are discouraged, have known it of course for this long time & know it all well because as you know I’ve been there myself—right from our start really from just the time you were born, living till then with and for this Great Book I was writing, had written, saw it drop like a shot & started a new life ‘raising a family’; 2 years writing a long play & saw it as hopeless; 7 years writing another Great Book & saw it drop like a shot . . . & another marriage with it . . . easy enough to say, the 2 books as ‘classics’, that it was all worth it but I certainly didn’t know that at the time—& with Eliot writing 50 years ago ‘Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure . . . and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious’ and that was 50 years ago, the times are certainly far less promising now for publishing good work or making good movies with MHG in facing the same vast tide of trash overwhelming all & everyplace, publisher or film studio, interested only in the ‘bottom line’ including my own Simon & Schuster I just thank heaven I got the book finished & got the advance when I could, all spent now but I could hardly ask for a deal like that again & may even sell a few copies.
All of which isn’t really what all this is about anyway, it’s more about stopping & regrouping rather than ‘giving up’ as you say, giving up hopes & illusions perhaps but not the thing itself to ‘always do it and be drawn to it’ as you say again but, again as I’ve done more than once, to know when the time comes to give it a rest & turn one’s efforts & energies elsewhere when one’s own work done under conditions of desperation cannot be as good as it should be & eventually will be. I must say the whole area of foundation work does seem more suitable to you than anything I’ve ever heard & I should think your resume sounds made for it. The Lannan people I’ve talked with (notably Patrick himself) sound extraordinarily cool civilized throughtful & steady calm in this chaotic corner (the arts) of this chaotic world & these chaotic times we live in & that any help they can give you sincere & real & to your credit seeing things in you that perhaps you’ve somewhat lost track of & I’m glad you’re pursuing it & giving it a chance out there [Los Angeles] before you give
up on the place itself, a little more time for it before you think of another major move. I must quickly make a minor one (to the post office) & will send you word of the nutty adventures at this end when I have it probably next week or so, wait & pray.
much love always
Papa
Eliot [...] unpropitious: from part 5 of “East Coker.”
To Judith Gaddis
[Enclosed in a copy of Flaubert–Sand: The Correspondence (Knopf, 1993).]
[late August 1993]
Dear Judith,
I’d been reading this back in last rather grim winter & since your letter in the spring mentioning your imminent trip to France and Mme Sand’s environs had meant to send it along before now, suddenly seeing that September when you plan to go is only days away. It is certainly one of the more touching friendships spawned by literature & its discontents & clearly I felt more than a little kinship with Flaubert though here of course the 17year age difference is reversed & it’s she who has the children & he the mother . . .
I look at the book I’ve just finished & wonder if it has any relation to life as we’ve lived & known it (though I’m sure the reviewers will straighten me out on that when it finally appears around the end of the year) . . . certainly it embraces little of the generous warmth of this letter of yours; & in a way the only real mirrors I have are Sarah & Matthew who are neither of them having an especially smooth or easy or happy time of it. It’s all rather like the epigraph I’d chosen (but have since replaced) for this new novel: aunque sepa los caminos, yo nunca llegaré a Córdoba—in spite of knowing all the roads, I will never get to Cordoba.
I probably exaggerated the hospital episodes from my own apprehensions & communicated elsewhere what Modern Medicine regards as quite routine & proved to be no more than thoroughly unpleasant discomfort, plumbing repairs in a word, but I have deeply felt your wonderfully generous love & concern & so we go forward counting our blessings as it were, I hope your France trip is a marvelous one,
W
To Clare Alexander
[Publishing Director at the London office of Penguin Viking. The Bosch artwork WG suggests below was indeed used for the cover of the UK edition, which appeared in June 1994. The artwork for the US edition, a family in-joke, was a “painting” from Sarah Gaddis’s childhood.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
17 September 1993
Dear Ms Alexander.
I was happy to have your letter with word that you will be publishing A Frolic of His Own in Britain next spring, and your courtesy in consulting me about the cover.
Regarding the fax you speak of receiving of the US book jacket you may have seen an early & somewhat jumbled version (not to speak of the poor quality of faxed art in general) & I have asked Simon & Schuster to send you a fairly finished proof which I am quite pleased with.
Elsewhere I’m sure you’ve seen the really splendid covers on the new Penguin XXth Century Classic eds. of J R & The Recognitions, products of a frenzy of faxed exchanges between me & Michael Millman at Penguin New York, in fact looking over our rejections I come across the enclosed detail from H. Bosch’s gigantic Garden of Delights which* I have found rather haunting & may intrigue you for the moment; & as anything turns up elsewhere I shall surely let you know.
The good Lord only knows where I shall be next spring when you publish, I should certainly like going down to Kew in Lilac time better than anything but there are so many contingencies I daren’t think of them now. Meanwhile I look forward to continuing with this exchange.
with best regards,
W. Gaddis
*a point being to bring out the ironic rather than frivolous use of the fine word ‘frolic’ in cover art & lettering so it doesn’t promise just another damn silly book like those engulfing the market here.
H. Bosch’s gigantic Garden of Delights: The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych (87 x 153 inches) Bosch painted sometime between 1490 and 1510, which WG would have seen at the Prado in Madrid.
To Robert Creeley
[American poet and critic (1926–2005), then teaching at SUNY Buffalo. The final paragraph refers to WG’s designation by Governor Mario Cuomo as the official New York State Author for 1993–95, which entailed a trip to SUNY Albany for a ceremony.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
20 September 1993
Dear Bob,
many thanks for your note & for taking interest in this agreeable plight we share: coming up with more $$ for the detritus than we ever did from the published work (Oh! to have the intransigent integrity of Justice OW Holmes ordering all his papers burnt & letting his Opinions stand for themselves nobody’s business how he got there . . . of course he left most of his estate to the US Treasury though with taxes what they are we are doing practically the same thing.)
I’ve had various ‘feelers’ regarding my ‘archives’ even a visit from one of those Santa Barbara dealers a few years ago but have wanted to finish this last 586pp novel A Frolic of His Own now in bound proofs for Jan 94 publication & get all that dead matter back before considering the next move, & had had in fact a feeler from this Minkoff (mentioning yours) a couple of months ago saying he thought it’s worth a good deal of money whatever that means, I responded with some estimate of the bulk of it (goes back complete to the MS &c of The Recognitions) but never heard again from him so heaven knows whom he’s got now ‘much interested’ in buying, he knows where I am.
You won’t happen to be in Albany around 10 November (I think is the date) will you? to see me canonized New York State Author (+ check) from the Governor? I’d be delighted if so,
best regards
Willie
Justice OW Holmes: Oliver Wendall Holmes (1841–1935), mentioned often with approval in FHO (23, 46, 109, 286, 429, 443, 472, and 574 [the quip about leaving his estate to the US Treasury]).
Minkoff: George Robert Minkoff, a New York rare-book dealer and writer (not to be confused with the Robert Minkoff who wrote his dissertation on R.) WG never did sell his archives during his lifetime.
To the Editors, Iowa Review
Wainscott NY 11975
28 September 1993
Dear Editors.
Thank you for the distinction you so generously heap upon me in your recent letter regarding your forthcoming issue on ‘experimental fiction’. I fear however that in this deluge of critical approaches and categories—high modern, post-modern, deconstruction, post-structural, where I frequently see my work discussed at length—‘experimental’ is the one which I find specifically unsuited, due to my sense of the decline in the use and meaning of ‘experimental’ and ‘experiment’ from the blunt dictionary definition as ‘A test made to demonstrate a known truth’ to which I should happily subscribe, to the rather loose embrace of writing pursued willy-nilly in some fond hope of stumbling on those strokes of brilliance which that perfect poet Keats mistrusted even in himself observed with “It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.”
From the start almost a half century ago I have believed (& Keats to witness) that I knew exactly what I am doing: as ‘known truth’ for example, that style must match content, hence the fragmentation in The Recognitions; language and disorder, and authorial absence going back to Flaubert, in J R; exercising the cliche in Carpenter’s Gothic; language and order in A Frolic of His Own.
Thus it would be quite unseemly (not to say inflammatory) for me to name as ‘carrying the torch of the experimental movement’ writers who might well feel that they too know exactly what they are doing as I trust you will understand, as I trust you will further understand that I have no wish or intention of disparaging your enterprise, or of belittling your generous appraisal of my work. I have no short stories recent or otherwise, I do not wear T shirts, but can at least respond to your notion regarding ‘the work of new and established visual artists who use text in their works’ with the enclosed from Julian Schnabel’s Recognitions Serie
s (there are a half dozen or so of them nicely reproduced in his catalogues &c) which you may find pertinent.
With best regards,
W. Gaddis
Keats [...] not the thing”: assessing himself in a letter to B. R. Haydon (8 March 1819), Keats wrote: “I am three and twenty with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing” (so reads ODQ, WG’s source; other editors read the last three words as “nothing”). Also quoted in J R (486).
Julian Schnabel’s Recognitions Series: a 1987 suite of paintings featuring words or phrases from R, published in catalogue form as Reconocimientos Pinturas del Carmen/The Recognitions Paintings del Carmen (Kunsthalle Basel, 1989).
To Donn O’Meara and William Carnahan
[A fax sent to each of these old friends. It begins with the opening lines of Tennyson’s “Tithonus” (1859), a figure from Greek mythology who asked for and received immortality from his lover Eos, goddess of dawn, but forgot to ask to remain forever young. Now withered and decrepit “Here at the quiet limit of the world” (l. 7), he is transformed by Eos into a grasshopper. Cf. AA: “where immortality finds its home at last, where the voice has dwindled to the dry scratch of a grasshopper” (81).]
19 November ”93
And here The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan . . . literally, literally; & did I ever mention that a ½ century ago I changed my middle name on Harvard’s transcripts from ‘Thomas’ to ‘Tithonus’ there conjuring the day when through Eos’ intervention I’d secure immortality forgetting, in our lust, to stipulate eternal youth, until the day comes round (Here at the quiet limit of the world) when, pitying, the Dawn to the rescue has him transformed into the grasshopper with its relentless immortal tdzzzk, tdzzzk, tdzzzk . . .