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Well! have I simply compounded our difficulties? It may be the most expeditious course just to translate the whole passage word-for-word and leave it all for some brilliant graduate student to decode in his doctoral PhD dissertation.
The ‘rockets’ you ask about were probably to illuminate targets (or incendiaries?) from “the rockets’ red glare” in our Star Spangled Banner written during the War of 1812 (vs. Britain).
And finally, I am quite stunned by your “little brochure for the booksellers”, it is extremely handsomely done, I’d never seen that picture in the overcoat before & needless to say my vanity runneth over, could I presume to ask you to send me ½ dozen more copies? (The design of the book’s jacket is also marvelous but of course vanity prevails), you may imagine how I look forward to publication!
With warm regards,
William Gaddis
Ortega y Gasset’s mass man: see his Revolt of the Masses.
Gresham’s Law: named for Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579); an economic principle cited in several of WG’s writings and interviews.
To Alice Mayhew
[An editor at Simon & Schuster who had sent WG a galley of James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett to solicit a blurb. The last paragraph reveals that WG had decided to resurrect his player piano project from the 1940s; his new agent Andrew Wylie sold the proposal to the ever generous Allen Peacock, then at Henry Holt, for a $150,000 advance. It was to be a nonfiction work entitled Agapē Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano, and tentatively scheduled for publication in the fall of 1998.]
East Hampton, NY 11937
21 June 1996
Dear Alice,
many thanks for sending me the Beckett book; however having tried these 40 years to get the word around that I’ve never & don’t do or solicit blurbs, here again to save you further trouble. As opposed to (already published) quotes from responsible critics & reviews I just don’t believe these blurbs help much, too often obvious as doing pals a good turn or returning a favour or hitching a ride on someone else’s bandwagon.
So we appear directly opposed: S&S favouring blurbs & (in my own recent experience) disdaining advertising, whereas I’d disdain the former & embrace the latter, not that an ad goes out & sells books but I do think that, appropriately placed, it announces one to those who have missed initial reviews; reminds those where good reviews have slipped their minds in the weekly avalanche of new books; but perhaps most important—as I indicated to that enigmatic cipher assigned as my S&S “editor” following A Frolic’s widespread splendid reviews to which he deigned a reply some 5 weeks later—it tells potential readers and booksellers that the publisher is pleased even proud to be publishing this book and that he stands behind it.
Our Germans seem to agree as you see from the attached prepared for its imminent publication there mailed to critics &, can I have heard them right? to 8000 booksellers!
Thanks again for the Beckett, I look forward to it but will take time to give it the attention it obviously deserves since I’m almost totally occupied right now on a project exactly 50 years in the gestation only now moving its slow thighs &, as I hope, its hour come round at last.
with best regards
W. Gaddis
moving its slow thighs [...] at last: the “rough beast” of Yeats’s classic poem “The Second Coming” (1921).
To John Updike
[WG attached a letter by Ormonde de Kay in response to a harsh review of the Everyman omnibus edition of Updike’s Rabbit novels by Harvard professor Robert Kiely that appeared in “The Browser” column of the July/August 1996 issue of Harvard Magazine. A number of letters to the editor condemning Kiely’s piece were printed in the next issue, but not de Kay’s.]
East Hampton, NY 11937
5 August 1996
Dear John,
should ‘they’ (Harvard Magazine) fail to print this I thought you might be cheered by the outcry attached from a classmate & Lampoon activist as appalled as was I at “Browser”’s jeremiad not for what was said there—we must be inured to those by now—but where, those of your own house as Matthew has it somewhere. It is arrogantly not a general circulation magazine but one addressed to an exclusive audience: those alums who buy Harvard chairs & Veritas cocktail sets, have prospered sufficient to sail the Aegean in comfort & swell the class gift buoyed up by puff pieces on colleagues’ wizard works in astrophysics, butterfly pinning &c, all of it underscored by those canons of decency which 3 centuries of Harvard have essentially been all about, & every one of which this episode violates. But this today is not the Harvard College we took in; rather some $6billion multinational conglomerate flailing about in a corresponding ethical vacuum (for I’d indict the editor(s) as or even beyond Bowser himself), though I’d never faintly imagined the extent of the motley invasion that Ormonde documents here.
Auguri!
and best regards,
W. Gaddis
your own house as Matthew has it: Matt. 10:36: “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”
Auguri!: Italian, “best wishes.”
To Miriam Berkley
[A professional photographer who had interviewed WG for Publishers Weekly in 1985 and shot several photos of WG over the years. The one he praises below was reproduced on the jacket of Peter Wolfe’s A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis (Fairleigh Dickenson Univ. Press, 1997).]
East Hampton, NY 11937
9 November ’96
dear Miriam Berkley.
Where to start? The apology or the 3 cheers . . . well, on the happier note I must say that if this were obituary time from all the pranks the camera has played upon me I should hands down the picture—more of a portrait really—of which you so kindly (& rare among photographers) sent me the large print, I believe it the bottom far left on contact sheet #4: it is in all my crude vanity the most straight no-nonsense item in the archive & I do thank you (paging the NYTimes).
The apology is of course self evident in the time I have taken to thank you & return the contacts. For no reason I can imagine I spent the 2nd ½ of August at Southampton Hospital with a ‘compartmental syndrome’, a torn calf muscle which swelled the whole left calf marvelously with bad blood & tissue, enter the ‘sports medicine’ surgeon to cut open 2 long gashes & remove the detritus leaving 2 splendid scars & a foot still ½ numb to this day. I’d pictured going to Frankfurt (Rowohlt had said they would ‘send someone over to get me’!) but with the leg & other items unmentionable I pretty much lost my appetite for it & fell into a blue funk only now emerging from it. I felt very badly about it since both Rowohlt & Zweitausendeins had made such handsome books & been so generous I can only hope they felt rewarded by the raft of stunning reviews as obviously I was. The Recognitions is due out (by 2001) before too long & A Frolic &c in France (Plon) this spring. [...]
Many many thanks again,
W Gaddis
To Gregory Comnes
[Enclosed with a packet of German reviews of translations of J R and FHO. The salutation’s exclamation point mimics that in German letters.]
East Hampton, NY 11937
3 December 1996
dear Gregory Comnes!
from a last year’s letter of yours I gather you read German? Or is it only Eigen (threatening suit v. J R Corp.)—much enough like ‘my’ German in the hands (mouth) of Gibbs on the train, since I can read practically none of the enclosed though it generally looks friendly, & I thought might amuse you &/or give you fodder . . .
At any rate I have found it astounding, an entire REBIRTH . . . & in German(y), far cry from Michiko Kamikaze & Co. I did not feel quite up to going to the Frankfurt book fair (Rowohlt even said they would send someone over to get me!) but a bad leg (‘compartmental syndrome’) interfered, nonetheless the books seem to have prospered mightily & The Recognitions due for the spring.
Indian giver as always, I send you this bundle with the request that you return it eventually, something t
o while away these long winter evenings. Soon enough (Christmas eve) I expect to go to Miami for a week or so then Key West for January & Feb, I cannot handle another winter’s snow & dark here again & will be in touch once I have something resembling an address there, meanwhile
Auguri!
—Gaddis
Eigen [...] v. J R Corp.: in July 1994 Comnes sent WG a mock e-mail document in which Thomas Eigen, represented by J. R. Vansant, threatens to take action against WG for misrep-resenting his work in FHO.
To Liesl and Molly Friedrich
[The daughters of WG’s old friends Otto and Priscilla Friedrich, whose memorial service he had missed.]
East Hampton, NY 11937
13 December 1996
dear Liesl & Molly,
when I called the house that Monday afternoon aware, first, of the commotion of voices people phone ringings kitchen doings more people, where’s the bathroom? can you move your car? is there any gin? preparing for Tuesday morning’s event &, second, aware that I wouldn’t get there or even, finally, that either of you would pick up the phone answered nonetheless by a young lady, Julia was it? Molly’s daughter? most courteous but so young, which crept in upon me as I fell into an old man’s plaint over how the loss of old close & faithful friends somehow diminished one’s own sense of being to which she responded not with some dismal platitude for this self-serving notion but rather a positive cheerful alternative which I must say reduced me still further—ah youth!
Nonetheless it is true. Vanity? fear? the chill memento mori in old Spain’s ‘vida sin amigo, muerte sin testigo’? But however it is immensely true for me at any rate in the loss of Otto & Priscilla, almost half a century, imagine! of every kind of up & down on all hands, extraordinary courage on their parts & a kind of idiotic ‘it can’t happen here’ on mine from Paris to Massapequa leaving me feeling somewhat like the Easter Bunny Who Overslept, Priscilla running a rather distracting household, I in the cellar saying No water today, I have to sink a new well & install new pump, & Otto walking that rainswept mile to the LIRR to the NY Daily News but still, my abiding memories are of wide lawns in the sun & 2 small unclothed beauties gamboling by, how deeply fond my mother was of you both & of Priscilla especially. I’ve always regretted that Otto never got round to writing the short & venomous book he contemplated on what happened to that sweet old town. I last saw him at a party of Ted Morgan’s on a sunny New York rooftop, one whole side of him still as a board but that incorrigibly warm even twinkling smile of, well, generosity?
Generosity, yes, yes that was probably what I felt most from them both putting their own travails aside for it, as that last & indelible time I saw Priscilla &, of course, both of you that sunny afternoon I got out to Locust Valley thank heavens, limping around with my own absurdities & —Willie? can we get you something? some cheese? some ham? in that charming room, sun crisp slipcovers books books books & Priscilla as always filled with brisk good cheer & all of you concerned for me & not the loss that still hung in the air, & how glad I am that I had that last long chat with Priscilla (aside from a few subsequent phone calls when, expecting to find her in extremis, instead hear her plan for an October trip where was it, Turkey? & again, she is off for Block Island; & again, this parting bit of advice: Just remember, Willie, you don’t have to do what the doctors tell you . . .
Character? Courage (which I suppose is a part of character?) So one can easily see how, for example, Margaret loved and admired her (with a rather wild kind of courage herself) & the efforts she made to get out there from New Hampshire to see her, makes us all want to go back (or feel we should) & read Emerson on Friendship.
So at any rate there you both are at this immense juncture & the responsibilities ahead that go with it but good heavens look at this terrific bunch of genes you’ve inherited to meet them. The last line in a marvelous BBC adaptation of Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, after dealing with every kind of betrayal, financial disaster, passions runs amock &c, the family lawyer who had overseen all this, Soames, asks “What was it all for?” but I think we know: since Nature’s mission is prolongation of the race, the tribe, the family &c it is this next generation that all these travails are ‘for’, from my & Otto & Priscilla’s generation you both, and Niki & Amelia too, & even that brief light of Tony [Otto’s youngest son], and Sarah, and Matthew, ‘for’ the next generation you all bring along. We do & will always owe you all so much for what you have given us.
Auguri! and love,
Willie
‘vida sin amigo, muerte sin testigo’: “life without a friend, death without a witness” (R 112).
the Easter Bunny Who Overslept: title of a children’s book cowritten by the Friedrichs (1957), often reprinted and reillustrated.
Ted Morgan: French-American historian and biographer (1932– ), whom WG had known for years.
Locust Valley: the Friedrichs’ residence on Long Island.
Emerson on Friendship: an 1841 essay.
BBC adaptation of Galsworthy Forsyte Saga: a twenty-six-part serial broadcast in 1967 adapted from John Galsworthy’s trilogy of novels (1906–21).
To Don DeLillo
East Hampton, NY 11937
21 September 1997
dear Don,
the ‘physics’ of baseball is an astounding piece of work & as though served up for my nefarious purpose, many thanks for going to the trouble of getting it to me; as for the generously signed copy of your new grand entry I think you know the measure of my appreciation,
very best regards,
Gaddis
the ‘physics’ of baseball: The Physics of Baseball is a 1990 book by Robert K. Adair, a Yale professor of physics, and is cited in AA (47). “Your grand new entry” is DeLillo’s eleventh novel, Underworld (1997).
Top: WG’s final home on Boat Yard Road.
Bottom: Saul Steinberg, Judith Gaddis, and WG, Key West, 1997.
To Christopher Knight
[A critic (1952– ) who contributed to In Recognition of William Gaddis, Knight sent WG a copy of his book Hints & Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997). The following typed letter begins with a handwritten note at top:]
My letter carefully written to you almost a month ago, and then as carefully packed with other papers for the journey home at any rate here it finally is
Key West, Fla.
25 April [1998]
Dear Christopher Knight.
I am sorry being so long about thanking you for sending your Hints & Guesses & for the work itself. I won’t go into the somewhat bizarre circumstances that have contributed to the long delay but rather the great pleasure & rewards I had on first examining it, & have even now not yet read it thoroughly through.
However what is immediately evident is your readiness (nay, appetite!) for pursuing situations beyond their appearances (as background of American Gothic (pp. 165fol.) even if contradictory; or better perhaps the citations of cases, pursuing outside references; or picking up on small but vital details consistently missed by ‘reviewers’ (as Cruickshank/Lester (obvious) leap from CIA to industrial espionage); also my attempt at the Holmes/Crease///Hand marvelous collision. Those for random starters.
Incidentally I thought it might amuse you (177fol.) Jane Eyre sequence, my attempt to find a writing style to conjure up a reading/visual style in such total contrast to the actual bed scene: this attempt to impose her fiction upon the reality almost coming to grief through editor’s failure to get permission for the already written sequence using Lost Horizon only to be denied (didn’t like the sex-context) at the very last minute by Hilton’s estate so I broke my neck rushing through every public-domain distinctive prose passage & think it worked (though not so well as the original).
Such the pitfalls. I regret, once again, being so brief & perfunctory with this response to what I find around the top of works I’ve seen on mine, with on the one & happy hand reaching back to what you have made from our first encounter & I an agonized paranoid/sh
y (guest), to the opposite which I might have anticipated with some academic collisions under my belt now the inevitable sharp words that must emerge between those selling apples & those selling oranges.
I am incidentally heavily involved just now in a book on the player piano (the one Gibbs didn’t write in J R) tangled for the moment in contract difficulties (my work incidentally doing immensely well in Germany (where they read) and even should we all survive all (meaning all) the notes for the Pepsi-Cola-Episcopal case, God help us all & thank you again,
Warm regards
William Gaddis
our first encounter: WG had visited John Kuehl’s class at NYU when Knight was a graduate student there.
Matthew Gaddis, WG, and Sarah Gaddis, Key West, 1998.
To Gregory Comnes
East Hampton, NY 11937
17 July 1998
Greg,
The Plutarch on Herodotus Father of Lies is a sheer delight, how else would I have got hold of it & I do thank you (as well as followups) fits in so beautifully with my (also Plato’s in banishing Homer?) assault on/embrace of the ‘fictions’ adorning the naked animal; also & obviously I do enjoy a bit of malice & Plutarch is a marvel at it here . . .
More to follow eventually but I wanted to get this off at least, warm best to you both,
WG
Plutarch on Herodotus: in his essay “On the Malice of Herodotus,” first-century-AD Greek biographer Plutarch dismissed much of the history written by fifth-century-BC Herodotus, called by some the Father of History.