now designated New York State’s official
State Author ($10 thousand, to help pay the taxes on) the Lannan award ($50 thousand), another damned thick square book
meanwhile the electrical and
plumbing ravages attended to: a pacemaker, prostate resection, inguinal hernia I tell you it’s all metaphor.
In fact, I may well have looked you up last July had not the prostate venture kept me wandering the corridors of New York Hospital, a bag of bloody urine tied to my leg, from joining Eos (Muriel Oxenberg) tripping to a working (filming) visit to the archaeological dig at Ashkelon stopping off at the Wailing Wall to have a good cry; & despite Eliot’s dictum that old men ought to be explorers I find the notion of travel increasingly unattractive echoing, I believe, your own reservations
OR EVEN—not a glass of spirits lo these 4 years (but a glass of wine for the stomach’s sake) still fighting the tobacco monster breathless at the thought of staggering up those heights at Bellagio ever again,
Aunque sepa los caminos,
yo nunca llégare a Córdoba
as the original epigraph for this imminent (january)
last book which I replaced at the last minute with Thoreau (to Emerson):
What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you came full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.
tdzzzk tdzzzk tdzzzk . . .
with corresponding best wishes,
WG
Lannan award: WG received its Lifetime Achievement Award earlier in 1993 and flew to Los Angeles to receive it.
Ashkelon: ancient coastal city in Israel, about 50 miles west of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall.
Eliot’s [...] explorers: from part 5 of “East Coker.”
To Charles Monaghan
[Monaghan informed WG that his publisher for the British edition of R, Timothy O’Keeffe, died on 11 January 1994. Monaghan had also had just read A Frolic of His Own, published in January.]
[22 January 1994]
Sorry to hear about Tim O’Keeffe but we are beginning to get more such news daily, last time I saw him was at London pub some years ago & did the drink help him along? I’ve had no spirits (wine only) these 4 years & can’t say I like it but thanks for your note & glad you liked the book
—Gaddis
To John W. Aldridge
New York, NY 10021
9 February 94
Dear Jack Aldridge,
a great pleasure to hear from you on this more or less occasion mainly of course with your good opinion of the new book & ‘as up there with (my) very best’, some of the reviewers even grudgingly conceding its being more ‘accessible’; & since I’ve made a show of neither writing nor soliciting ‘endorsements’ your advance copy like them all went out with my short rein on the publisher to not even suggest such a thing to those on the list I gave them incl. yours, if Auchincloss & Heller simply couldn’t restrain themselves we all come off with a clean & happy slate.
I assumed (as I presumed you would) that
or should it be
I presumed (as I assumed you would) that you hardly courted the warm embrace of the NYTimes not, as you note, for scolding them over assigning novels to novelists & poets to poets but for putting their star daily reviewer on display as the quintessential symptom of the far greater plague to which you call attention—& in which the publishers (like their movie studio counterparts) are hardly blameless for its spread—wherein the field of criticism has been usurped by reviewers (see A Frolic of His Own foot of page 217) with the bland acquiescence of a lazy ‘readership’ for a fitting extrapolation of entropy where at last everything = everything else. Of course right now I’m hardly in a position to complain personally since Michiko Kamikaze (as she’s known locally) did, as some other reviewers, treat the book ‘respectfully’ if somewhat grudgingly & sublimely humourless in her earnest approach &, heaven knows, I’ve been beyond fortunate in the NYReview of Books, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Phila Inquirer even 4 not entirely rave but thoughtful pages in the New Republic & so, I think Gertrude Lawrence said, what we lose on the swings we can make up on the roundabouts.
In light of the above it’s very good news that you’re taking on Cormac McCarthy who is a rare one & well worth more serious attentions (some day I’ll tell you the pig joke he told me), meanwhile we’re in town for now if you’re both passing through before this insane winter weather gives in to the hounds of spring.
with all best regards
Gaddis
Auchincloss & Heller: brief statements by both novelists appear on the front and rear dust-jacket flaps, respectively.
page 217: the lawyer Madhai Pai corrects Basie: “I did not say book critics I said reviewers, there’s a world of difference although the reviewers are delighted to be referred to as critics unless they’re on the run, then they take refuge in calling themselves journalists.”
Michiko Kamikaze: Kakutani (1955– ) writes about new fiction for the daily New York Times, where she reviewed FHO on 4 January 1994.
Gertrude Lawrence: WG forgot that he had already used this line with Aldridge in his letter of 28 January 1976.
Cormac McCarthy: Aldridge’s essay “Cormac McCarthy’s Bizarre Genius” appeared in the August 1994 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
the hounds of spring: a once-famous image from Swinburne’s verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865).
To Clare Alexander
New York, New York 10021
13 February 1994
Dear Clare,
While US applause may echo rather hollow in the British press I nonetheless enclose a dozen or so reviews & interviews which may be of use in promoting your publication of A Frolic of His Own in June.
The reviews vary from respectful to quite marvelous, Jonathan Raban in the NY Review of Books is really stunning & such provincial capitals as Boston & Philadelphia happily intelligent & high spirited. The interviews, to which I submitted with some trepidation, turn out quite merciful & that in the Washington Post is surely all one could wish for. There is also a ½ page ad finally scheduled for the NYTimes Book Review representing the whole extent of Simon & Schuster’s such efforts to date which seems rather feeble response with the enclosed material to draw on & especially short sighted in the country the size of this one where the Washington Post & Los Angeles Times have been so generous, & the smaller literary press quite overlooked.
Snow banked outside the windows makes the possibility of your bringing me to London in June daily more attractive & I look forward to hearing from you about further developments.
kind regards,
W. Gaddis
Jonathan Raban in the NY Review of Books: “At Home in Babel” in the 17 February issue, pp. 3–4, 6.
Washington Post: “America’s Greatest Novelist?” by John Schwartz, which appeared on the front page of the Style section of the Post on 3 February 1994.
Los Angeles Times: reviewed by Richard Eder in the 9 January 1994 issue.
To Paul Ingendaay
New York, New York 10021
13 February 1994
Dear Paul Ingendaay,
your Romane von W* G* is indeed a handsome piece of work & thank you for sending it to me. We seem to have been exchanging letters for rather a while & I’ve almost the feeling that you may have spent as much time & energy disentangling my work as I’ve put in creating the tangles, those of this last book at any rate which has got off to a far better start critically & in sales than its predecessors in large part I think for having been labled more ‘accessible’ & even, reviewers finally admit, highly comic.
Your pointing out the arboreal carnage interwoven in J R of course rears again in the new book with its concluding screaming parody of The Cherry Orchard occasioned, in fact by precisely such a horror at the far (but scarcely far enough) end of our driveway at the heretofore tranquil place on Long Island day after day saws trucks bulldozers for the last 2 years I worked on t
he book there, no underestimating the destructive power of money in the wrong hands (where it usually is) & the powerlessness of ‘art’ in collision, hardly news but always news to me.
I’m needless to say more than curious looking forward to see what emerges from Rowohlt’s efforts with those legal opinions rendered into German! & I’m further sure that your efforts on my work’s behalf must have encouraged Naumann’s taking on this new assignment, for which I remain most grateful to you.
with my best regards again,
—Gaddis
The Cherry Orchard : Anton Chekhov’s final play (1904).
Rowohlt’s [...] Naumann’s: Michael Naumann of the German publishers Rowolht acquired rights to FHO, publishing it in Nikolaus Stingl’s translation as Letzte Instanz in the fall of 1996.
To Michael Millman
[The editor at Penguin responsible for the 1993 Penguin Classics reissues of R and J R. Penguin would add CG to their classics line in March 1999.]
Wainscott
2 March 94
Dear Michael Millman—
Candida has forwarded to me your letter regarding the new book & the shortfall on the 2 old ones—“puzzled” at how few copies of those have been ordered by bookstores recently—but why “puzzled”? When ½ the country thinks they’re still out of print and—as you observe yourself—need ads to remind them of the new epiphanies. Along these lines I enclose my letter to “my editor” at S&S (not yet acknowledged)—
What seems such a damned shame in both cases is the marvelously successful effort that went into making the books themselves—yours with the 2 ‘classics’, covers (which should have so splendidly framed even a small ad) &c, & the designers compositors copyreaders &c at S&S producing such a marvelous ‘product’ & after that everyone collapsing (you may have seen the off register “colour” ½ page in the Times BR—I ask you!).
best regards,
W. Gaddis
To Gregory Comnes
[Comes had written to ask (1) if WG would autograph his copy of FHO, and (2) if WG had received his Ethics of Indeterminacy. This note is undated and lacks a salutation.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
[March 1994]
NEW (for me) WORD: APORIA (from a Gertrude Himmelfarb rvw)
“difference, discontinuity, disparity, contradiction, discord, ambiguity, irony, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy, chaos”
LONG LIVE!
1) Surely, send the book for signing
2) I have your (signed) book & thank you
3) I have your note with it & don’t know what you mean with “all & sundry are busy complimenting me on the caustic comment made about my book” This is Jonathan Raban?
Ah!
Gaddis
Himmelfarb rvw: the word and definition are from Michiko Kakutani’s review of historian Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book On Looking into the Abyss in the New York Times, 1 March 1994, C19.
Raban: in the opening paragraph of his review of FHO in the New York Review, Raban refers to “the professional Gaddisites, a solemn crew themselves given to sentences like ‘Read from this perspective, The Recognitions demonstrates the essential alterity of the world, the meta-ethical virtue of agapistic ethics’” (from p. 49 of Comnes’s book).
To John Updike
[American novelist and critic (1932–2009) who, like WG, attended Harvard (class of ’54) and wrote for the Lampoon.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
13 March 1994
dear Reverend John,
how is it that we who have so desperately sought to rescue/impose order seem in the summing up to have led the most disorderly of lives? Your letters (now & a couple of years ago) breathe a kind of self contentment—longlasting wife, real estate, retirement work—which I gave up on long ago & which may point to our essentially opposite orientations: yours grounded on absolutes (as you’ve demanded from the start) vs. my attempt to “provide an honest vision of an essentially indeterminate landscape a postmodern world without absolutes” &c (v. Comnes, The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of W*G*, Univ. Florida Press 1994) for which I learn a new word “aporia” from a review of a theoretical opponent named Himmelfarb (sic) meaning “discontinuity, disparity, contradiction, discord, ambiguity, chaos” (she’s against it). Of course you have borne a tragedy which may only have confirmed your stance (like the patriotic parents who lost sons in Vietnam) either of which I am sure would have destroyed me confirming my stance. Think not the struggle naught availeth &c . . . Or is another word for it ‘romantic’ re your account of Mowery of whom I lost track long ago, or Bill Davison, d[itt]o. Dear old Barney Emmart, diabetic & other illnesses but I think finally a spirit severely damaged following a very bad mugging in Spain, a man of such wit & tenderness & a great loss dead as he was while still alive. Jacob Bean too who of course started off in the Divinity School &, in a manner of speaking, returned to it toward the end in an alcoholic haze of devout P.E. devotions as blindness overtook him, a gentleman in the most generous sense of the word. Thus regarding ‘our 50th’ D.V. but I doubt that I am, since I feel so strongly that it is not the college I went to but from their relentless mailings (inc. H* Magazine) has become a vast selfpromoting multinational corporation with [gap in manuscript] & no place whatsoever for me.
Like yourself I have had the body’s plumbing & electrical functions refurbished & am now casting about through the vast store of detritus those 4 books have left behind to see whether there lurks somewhere another ‘wanting to be written’ (as Samuel Butler had it), nearer I fear to Flaubert than I ever knew.
[unsigned fax]
you have borne a tragedy: perhaps a reference to the death of Updike’s mother in 1989.
Think not the struggle: the opening line of Arthur Hugh Clough’s once-popular poem of encouragement, “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” (1855; ODQ).
Mowery: unidentified.
Bill Davison: the man WG drove to Mexico with in 1947.
P.E.: elsewhere WG uses this abbreviation for Protestant Ethic.
To Polly Roosevelt
[The wife of a CIA officer (the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt), Ms. Roosevelt was born Mary Lowe Gaddis; she apparently saw WG’s interview in the Washington Post and wrote to see if they were related.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
14 March 1994
Dear Ms. Roosevelt.
Thank you for writing: I too am just into my 70s & so understand the haste involved & only wish I could be of more help regarding your inquiry.
In fact I can really be none at all. Had you asked about my mother’s side (Williams, Hough, Meredith &c) I could have gone on chapter & verse, largely Quaker stock moving from the Carolinas to Indiana in one of those schisms before the Civil War & gradually drifting back to the East Coast, my mother age about 18 to a brief college career at Sweetbriar & thence to New York where she met this dashing fellow & married at 22 & he wasn’t much older in the high spirits of the 20s, little fliers on Wall Street (where he overworked) which seemed to go on theatre tickets & finally a breakdown & they separated when I was about 3 brought up by my mother’s family & I didn’t see him again until I was in my 20s when we got reacquainted or I should say acquainted but I never did pursue his lineage with him, thought it was largely Scotch Irish (as much also on my mother’s side with England & Wales) but met his ancient mother who was German Catholic which I later understood hadn’t set too well with the Williams side, recalling an equally ancient thee-&-thou great aunt of mine whose visits east from Fountain City Indiana in the 30s we would try to spark with trips up to the Roosevelt shrine at Oyster Bay (we lived on the South Shore) & there, I’m afraid, I must leave you.
There were other Gaddis uncles of his involved in NY state politics especially in the Dewey years & all of their fortunes might have changed mightily had he won that presidential election [in 1948] when who knows, all sorts of revelations might have surfaced & we might even have met. Meanwhile my best wishes for your & yo
ur sister’s good health (since that’s what it all seems to be coming down to at last),
with warm regards
William Gaddis
To Arthur A. Hilgart
[A businessman, radio host, and patron of the arts (1936–2010) who occasionally corresponded with WG. After an unidentified reference to “Alcott,” WG clarifies some points in FHO.]
Wainscott, New York 11975
14 March 1994
dear Hilgart,
the healing power of Pepsi is splendid but the Alcott frolic is quite beyond anything—years of reviews of my work have shown me how rare is the careful reader, ergo:
No, Trish didn’t marry both men, it’s simply another turn on ‘getting it wrong’ which preoccupies me (see Carpenter’s Gothic): Lily has simply blurted out that Trish said she’d got married & Christina takes for granted it’s Madhai Pai (she’d married Bunker). No, Basie had nothing to do with Judge Crease getting hold of the opinion, he’s simply got it through channels & of course on the lookout for it. And no, Harry wasn’t in the accident caused by Lily (p.523); his death (515) is meant to be left in the realm of predictable, with Lily (491), unexplained fact lost & overwhelmed in the clutter of trivia (his Turnbull & Asser shirts) surrounding it.
Speaking of ‘careful reading’ here’s an item that was on my mind from the book’s start: the careful threading of the ‘hairy Ainu’ Harry & Christina in bed through her embarrassment with Basie’s cheerful ignorance to the blow that finally strikes her down (582) with the young lawyer’s —. . . no. No that’s not the Harry I knew. Perhaps some doctoral candidate will find it.
Kind regards,
W. Gaddis
‘hairy Ainu’: a reference to Japan’s Ainu tribe: see FHO 119–20.