—Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works
. . . is sad, Konrad said to Fro, that was not my word, Konrad said, it was not my word but it was the perfect word, it was the word that took in everything, the whole past present even perhaps the future while looking for the words to forestall that future because none of this was new, it had been going on for months, even years, even all the years since the dreadful third party came into the picture to help, I want you to help me with her the dreadful third party said gradually shifting the burden over months and finally years having to explain, having to account, being called to account Konrad told Fro, but every explanation or rather every attempt at explanation only demanded further explanation which was disregarded, every appeal was disregarded, shrugged off by the dreadful third party, the last thing I ever want to do is hurt her I told Fro, hurting her is absolutely the last thing I want to do so that finally it seems (I am told) all I do whatever I do or say hurts her until I hardly know what I am saying (or doing) which is the last thing I want to do (or say) because the next to the last thing I want to do is to enrage her but as the years go by and turn into months and finally the months turn into weeks everything I do or say seems to eventually enrage her I tell Fro, I’m going to run down and get the newspaper I’ll be back in a minute in my coat, standing there in my coat she is suddenly enraged because I thought there would be an interview with me in the newspaper (of course there wasn’t I tell Fro), none of my small triumphs seem to please her when I had thought they would please her when what I thought would please her is usually met with silence or even derision or even what seems like contempt because it means that I have put other obligations first, that is what hurts her and angers her, wouldn’t any woman feel that way I ask Fro? Is there anything surprising about that? That I put other obligations or what I think are obligations before my obligations to her, work obligations social obligations (contracts) the house obligations to her house here but she is not the house she is not talking about the house the house has nothing to do with her so that every attempt at explanation demands further explanation, with Q & A with a siege a veritable siege of Q & A living under siege at every encounter overflowing with conditions ultimatums assignments all totally unpredictable because the only thing that is predictable is its unpredictability overflowing with evidence of commission and omission which are always my sins of commission and omission I tell Fro, thoughtlessness carelessness memory lapses for insignificant moments or what I thought were insignificant moments become momentous events harbouring secrets which would only complicate things and which always complicate things on trial being on trial when One is not aware of being on trial because one is always on trial and any gesture of autonomy even the simplest gesture or the most complicated one becomes an evasion of control, or being controlled leading to assignments ultimatums conditions, there must be no conditions Eric is supposed to have said, I tell Fro, he (Eric) is a doctor and not only a doctor but a serious person making the statement “there must be no conditions” looking for relief, looking for blessed relief in the morning paper which may explain everything I tell Fro, here is a headline in the morning paper MEN AND WOMEN USE BRAIN DIFFERENTLY, STUDY DISCOVERS (“Using a powerful new method for glimpsing the brain in action”) which may explain everything . . .
third party: the psychoanalyst WG mentions in his letter of 4 January 1993.
Eric: unidentified.
headline in the morning paper: an article by Gina Kolata in the 16 February 1995 issue of the New York Times.
To Candida Donadio
[Some time after April 1995, WG moved to a small house in East Hampton, where he lived for the rest of his life.]
[#1 Boat Yard Road
East Hampton, NY 11937]
10 August (full moon, watch out!) 1995
Dear Candida,
so these are the Golden Years! Most reading seems to be obituaries, Elkin, Friedrich, Bazelon, most social events wakes, most news pain & abandonment still the sun comes up in the morning & goes down at night. I am quietly holed up in my 4 room house out here by an East Hampton boatyard (Muriel reels between Wainscott & NY) each day finding a new way to exercise my bad judgment: the latest was saying Yes to a request from the Natl Endowment for the Arts to serve on a ‘panel’ for fiction grants which means reading 275 x 30pp (= 8250 pages) of 98% hopeless MSS + writing a brief commentary for each, why why why did I do it!
Mainly though preoccupied with ‘getting my affairs in order’, while I try to figure out where my ‘career’ goes from here, meanwhile trying to corner what assets I have so the kids can make sense of things when the time comes. The past 4months entangled with selling the house in Piermont with every possible hitch, not least will be paying something like 41% IRS/NYS taxes on the sale; my other tangible asset being the boxes & boxes of my socalled ‘archive’ which we’ve talked of my selling for years now the time seems to have come. MSS, notes, galleys, correspondence &c and then this occurred to me: to complete it, what of our correspondence over the years, decades, from my letters to you over outrage with the Jovanovichs & Gottleibs of this world on & on & on (I’ve most I think of yours to me), are these packed away in some sort of dead file and could I ask for them back? They would fill out the endless ups & downs of this writer’s life & provide such a terrific record of the battlefield, could you let me know?
I think of you & yours often enough & painfully, have reports from your office that things are going along ‘as well as can be expected’ as they say, my own discomfirts pale beside yours of course, the sciatica gone I think & in its wake a ‘colonoscopy’ & now they would like to do a stomach-oscopy, & wondering what/how your plans are taking shape & by now how real any of it really is, do write or call & let me know.
love
Willie
obituaries: Stanley Elkin died in May 1995, Otto Friedrich a month earlier, and composer Irwin Bazelon on 2 August 1995.
To Jeff Bursey
[The Canadian novelist and literary critic (1963– ) had sent a letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review protesting Columbia professor and novelist Robert Towers’s review of FHO (9 January 1994, 1, 22), which was not printed. A year and a half later—by which time Towers had died—Bursey sent his letter to WG.]
16 Sept ’95
dear Jeff Bursey,
thanks for your letter to the Times book review; it certainly won’t change things but they do need to be reminded . . .
The problem with academic reviewers like Towers (especially those in the modest/failed novelist category who ‘teach’) seems consistently to be (as Christina remarks [FHO 11]) being taken seriously, hosannas for Melville (or on whomever they wrote their dissertation) but ponderous damns with faint praise for unruly contemporaries: Tom Clancy, anyone?
best regards,
W. Gaddis
Tom Clancy: best-selling novelist (1947– ) of techno-military thrillers.
To Judith Gaddis
East Hampton, NY 11937
29 Nov. ’95
dear Judith,
well! as my grandmother used to say, “one fire = 3 moves” & that is certainly the case with Piermont (the moves I mean) & what has disappeared over these 40 years, Massapequa, Saltaire, Piermont . . . usually only myelf to blame especially in the last case, people who’ve had a fire say that for years afterward they keep abruptly missing things: start with the attic in Piermont where I went with Matthew & a sturdy young man with a van (if you remember our van ride getting lost from my mother’s 19th str.), some things came down I’d forgotten (Chinese dolls) but where, where an original Lionel train set (probably worth some $900 now), I can see it where I’d put it, but no; painfully, that wonderful balloon picture I sought specifically, instead only the big phlox painting from grandmother house in Woodstock; of the 2 stove plant lithographs of Napper that hung in the guest room, only one; &c &c —could one of my awful string of tenants have climbed through the ceiling for them? Madness. [...] Records? God knows. An original roll of sh
eets from 1st printing of The Recognitions? ditto; a filing cabinet (next to last tenants)? same. Afghan throws & quilts by my grandmother’s hands? Well maybe, maybe those or some of those are with Sarah’s things in storage in Princeton since her divorce 100yrs ago. And the Roliecord camera I carefully hid somewhere in the house & never saw again. The mulberry tree was finally cut down, greatly overgrown & dropping its berries ankle deep.
So here I sit among relics: the small lazy susan from scrabble days at the Saltaire dinner table, chipped survivors of Quimper from the hooligan children’s raids in Massapequa 40 years ago . . . it all wrenching, wrenching, wrenching as you say, in every case it seems traceable to my own delinquency in the name of a writer’s obsession with finishing a book, & another book, at the agony & expense of everyone around him. I’m glad at any rate that that mortgage check helped to close out these dim latter Piermont days & leave us both with a good many many sunlit memories there together all, really, as tangible in their way as furniture & of far greater value, sunt lacrimae rerum (there are tears for things) notwithstanding. [...]
Of absent friends, I just gradually lost touch with the Nappers (he’d be well in his 80s by now & probably is), Martin I finally simply gave up on, he had alienated everyone he knew in terrible bitterness & I finally realized he is really quite mad. And then there are the obituaries, Otto Friedrich, Stanley Elkin, Terry Southern, & back to (mad) Barney Emmart & whose last words were these?: Si ça c’est la morte, ce n’est pas drole . . . (errors forgiven, not my language though I’ve been invited to Paris next May by some Pompidoux people if I’m still in 1 piece), who knows?
Meanwhile (Life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans) I am trying to embark on another project (book), a new agent after a generation with Candida whose health has badly sagged all quite a painful scene, but that is not a note I cared to end on, better your being “excited about finally being a grown-up” (though I’m not sure I can wholly recommend it, was it Hemingway who said ‘growing up is a very difficult thing and but few survive it’)? Always the encouraging word,
love
W.
sunt lacrimae rerum: a phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid (ODQ).
Si ça c’est la morte, ce n’est pas drole: “If this is death, it isn’t funny.”
Pompidoux people: the Centre Georges Pompidou, a cultural complex.
a new agent: Andrew Wylie.
Life is what happens [...] other plans: usually ascribed to John Lennon (from his 1980 song “Beautiful Boy”) but since it appears on p. 486 of J R, either the ex-Beatle got it from WG or (more likely) they both found it elsewhere.
Hemingway [...] few survive it’: another one of Jack Gibbs’s epigraphs (J R 486) but untraced.
To Larry M. Wertheim
[A lawyer (Kennedy & Graven) and adjunct professor of law at William Mitchell College of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He sent WG a copy of his essay “Law as Frolic: Law and Literature in A Frolic of His Own,” William Mitchell Law Review 21.2 (1995): 421–56, to which the page numbers below refer.]
East Hampton, NY 11937
12 March 1996
Dear Larry Wertheim,
(predictably) failing best cellardom, the time effort hopes &c that go into a piece of work like this last frolic of mine may however rarely provoke rewards a good deal more substantial than Today Show celebrity & this law review article of yours certainly ranks. It is a delight to me in its seizures on detail & nuance, width of its grasp & peripheral reading both in my earlier work & elsewhere & I suppose paramount to the novelist (or should be) believing & feeling for the characters.
That said, running through it item by item as they leap forth, in fact (423) despite reviews headlined Scathing Indictment of Law & Lawyers in the current mode, it’s been more warmly & happily embraced by lawyers which of course I’d intended & hoped for.
Your mention (425) that ‘the plot can largely be retold as a series of lawsuits’ recalls an initial notion I had of making it simply that, no narrative dialogue &c but the story emerging from an entanglement of complaints depositions brief[s] &c which thank heavens I abandoned, already stigmatized as ‘difficult’ as I am.
Curiously (427, 438, 443) the Eugene O’Neill entry was kind of a post hoc affair. I’d long since worked out the substitute/self murder equation, & even such details as the stiff father/major a judge, the cheek scar/head wound &c &c; then late along the way reread the O’Neill play which I (like Oscar) found contrived awkward stilted & altogether pretty bad BUT was honestly really startled at the correspondencies (‘substantial similarities’) with my tale: unconscious plagiary (but still culpable?) that Hand mentions? Because I had written papers in college & diagramed O’Neill/Greek drama/Freud. And then at the last minute it occurred to me that obviously the O’N. estate would sue Oscar & even, once the deed was done, wondered if (in ‘real life’) they would sue me. And so (443) while Oscar’s homage apologia embraces Plato I don’t think I meant it to O’Neill.
Regarding (428) the Episcopal/Pepsico suit: I’d originally intended it to be a prominent, if ancillary, feature of the book & had-&-have collected the vast amount of ammunition for this reductio-ad-absurdum version of rendering unto Caesar &c but was finally so overwhelmed by this additional prospect (as also realizing I could push the reader just so far) that I finally escaped it as the ‘lost’ brief at the end but God knows if I’m around for long enough it may yet surface as so rich with implications for our ridiculous times.
(Incidentally: for the sort of small prank I sometimes cannot resist & to keep my interest from flagging, I doubt any reader noted but picture his treat if he did, the confusion of the young lawyer & the lost brief (446) over the 2 Harrys (“That’s not the Harry I knew” Frolic paper ed. 506) harks back to the rather salacious exchange between Christina & Basie (id. 107 & 206) regarding the hairy Ainu, which finally sends Christina over the edge.) And speaking of Mr Basie I meant him as a man with a good deal of dimensions, cunning & compassion, saves Oscar from himself as it were, & ‘living’ parallel to the finally hunted down John Israel in the play.
Oscar’s lawsuit was well in (my) hand researched, outlined, determined outcome &c some time before Buchwald (434) & (as you note) distinct from it as breach of contract rather than plagiary though I did at the end pick up from Buchwald the ‘creative accounting’ details for Oscar’s ‘pyrrhic victory’ (444). (Incidentally I believe Paramount even had the gall to claim that the ‘idea’ for that really lousy movie was EMurphy’s.)
In light of the above & all of your marvelous insights, summation & care I hate to point out that it is Tatamount (id.29) not Tantamount (426) & not Frickert (428) but Fickert (id.373) I believe I stole from an old routine of Jonathan Winters. Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
My thanks to you again, with warm regards
William Gaddis
the O’Neill play: Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), based loosely on the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Oscar’s lawyer Basie calls it “a clumsy warmed over schoolboy parody of Euripides with a few vulgar Freudian touches thrown in for good measure” (FHO 96).
Buchwald [...] EMurphy’s: as noted earlier (first letter of 21 January 1990), Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America was the subject of a lawsuit brought by journalist Art Buchwald. Jonathan Winters: one of the stand-up comedian’s many personas was a grouchy old woman named Maude Frickert [sic], a recurring character on The Jonathan Williams Show (CBS, 1967–69).
Ah [...] for?: the most quoted line from Robert Browning’s poem “Andrea del Sarto” (1855).
To Thomas Überhoff
[Editor at Rowohlt Verlag who was overseeing Nikolaus Stingl’s German translation of FHO (Letzte Instanz, 1996). In a rare explication of his own prose, WG attempts to untangle a long sentence on page 304 as Oscar nods off while watching a television nature program on
a lackluster member of the Cistaceae or rockrose family, Helianthemum dumosum, more familiarly known in its long sufferin
g neighborhood as bushy frostweed for its talent at surviving the trampling by various hoofed eventoed closecropping stock of the suborder Ruminantia, to silently spread and widen its habitat at its neighbors’ expense like some herbal version of Gresham’s law in Darwinian dress demonstrating no more, as his head nodded and his breath fell and the crush of newsprint dropped to the floor, the tug at his lips in the troubled wince of a smile might have signaled no more than, or better perhaps the very heart of some drowned ceremony of innocence now the worst were filled with passionate intensity where—we share something then don’t we, no small thing either [Basie had told Oscar earlier] —That’s good to know, demonstrating simply the survival of the fittest embracing here in bushy frostweed no more than those fittest to survive not necessarily, not by any means, by any manner of speaking, the best [...].
Überhoff also asked what kind of “rockets” were used in the Civil War.]
East Hampton, NY 11937
12 May 1996
Dear Mr Überhoff.
Thank you for your inquiry: no question that that is about as dense a sentence as I have ever written, for which I apologize to Mr Stingl (but not to the reader!). I shall try to ‘shed some light’ which may simply confuse things further.
Overall, the ‘density’ is calculated to reflect the silent spread of bushy frostweed, here representing disorder & vulgarity (Ortega y Gasset’s ‘mass man’ proclaiming his rights to be vulgar) widening its habitat at its neighbors’ expense, i.e., Oscar’s elitism & search for order, as bad money driving out good in Gresham’s Law: thus the wincing defeat of Oscar’s (play=ceremony of) innocence as portrayed in Yeats’ poem The Second Coming wherein “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”, Yeats being the bond that brings Oscar & Basie closer (no small thing either as noted elsewhere (p.88) in the book). And so the metaphor of bushy frostweed for the worst full of passionate intensity (see Oscar’s diatribe on pp. 96–7) demonstrating here that survival of the fittest, rather than the best (‘plays of ideas’), means no more than those fittest to survive & quite possibly, as we see all around us, the worst.