B007RT1UH4 EBOK (102 page)

more than #12–14: no; WG is perhaps thinking of issue #11, a thirty-two page “Quote-Précis” of the novel.

To John and Pauline Napper

Wainscott, NY 11975

15 December 1981

Dear John and Pauline.

Your affectionate thoughts must have touched down upon me over this past year & more since however I continue to rant against the world’s iniquities & unfathomable stupidities life has gradually settled down to offer me a good deal of warmth & satisfaction as my 59th looms just 2 weeks hence.

First Muriel the constant companion & blessing undisguised, we are mainly out here at the chill tail end of Long Island where a fair number of friends from other days seem to have settled, spent some time last year in Mexico & will again this coming Feb-March largely for the weather, & the escape that gives me little choice but to sit down at this terrible machine & try to get on from page 99 to 100 (as I managed this morning) even when I think I’ve been working well I look back over a month or 2’s pages completed & am appalled at how few they are, another novel not a crusade this time like its 2 predecessors but simply, I hope, a ‘romance’ of sorts, its progress I can’t say slowed by lack of conviction but clearly coloured by a sense of futility from the fortunes of the 2 books before it, craft not art this time, filling a contract & for the moment some Guggenheim fellowship money to carry it forward (and oh ’tis comfort small, To think that many another lad has had no luck at all!)

Speaking here of Shropshire I was shocked thinking of you with this morning’s paper reporting heavy snows & –13°, so even more the credit to your work going well. Simplify! Simplify! says Thoreau & I too wish I could see it, now with the conviction that one’s later life is spent in undoing the complications so enthusiastically devised by the earlier—though of course I suppose that’s what
The Recognitions
was all about anyhow so perhaps all that distinguishes us from the machines is their ability to learn from their mistakes, the Jack Gold movie phantasy now long laid to rest.

The kids I must say though remain the best investment for these flagging years, Sarah & Peter as filled with good works & diligent cheer as from the start (they’ve come back to the east coast after 2 years of California, have your
Cat
hanging over their fireplace); Matthew among piecemeal film jobs in New York & quite as filled with indignation generally distributed as I was at that age & a future as unpredictable; but looking round me at other family situations I certainly count my blessings there.

There are places we want to go but as always God knows when, I did finally decide (& may have written you of it then) that I must see the Acropolis before moving out & we managed that what must be 2 years ago; & repeating Mexico may be too easy but I feel I’ve finally got to clear this job up & trust its ambience as sympathetic. And England? again, the Lord knows. It would be odd indeed to move out never having seen Shropshire! where it is at the least good to know you are thriving all things considered, with the hope that this may reach you in time enough to bring to you both warm affection from us all for the holidays & the inevitable new year,

Willie

and oh [...] at all!: from #28 of Housman’s
Last Poems
(1922).

Simplify! Simplify! says Thoreau: in the second chapter of
Walden
; the Town Carpenter echoes Thoreau’s advice in
R
(411, 441), as does Crawley in
J R
(449).

Matthew among piecemeal film jobs: in the 1980s Matthew worked on
My Dinner with Andre, Crackers
,
Alamo Bay
,
God’s Country
, and
The Suicide Club
.

To Steven Moore

[
Green refused me permission to reprint
Fire the Bastards!
in
In Recognition of William Gaddis
and was outraged that I had already begun preparing his work for publication without first securing his permission. (I hadn’t known of his whereabouts, or whether he could even be located.) See the introduction to the Dalkey Archive edition for further details.
]

235 East 73rd street

New York NY 10021

6 January 1982

Dear Steven Moore.

I’ve just had a note from Jack Green regarding your exchange of letters. Unfortunate in a way (I might have thought to write him myself first out of courtesy), means you cannot have the saga complete from the start, must I suppose open with such entrenched stupidity as Granville Hicks (parodied, among others, on pp. 515–6 of
J R
). However I can certainly see Jack’s point & of all people must honour it: his fierce intransigence & sense of integrity are of course what led him to take up cudgels on my book’s behalf these 27 years ago.

Next, responding to a question from you or Prof. Kuehl regarding my recollection of Jack Green, I think I said something like pre-hippie which, though in ways accurate enough, has by now too many pejorative implications & I do not wish to be so quoted. What is important to note is, should you now still plan any references to him, his indignation even then with the commercial ‘establishment’ (viz. his attacking those reviewers in those rather than coy literary terms, i.e. that they’d done poor to dishonest jobs & so should be fired) (my own feeling more recently for John Gardner’s
J R
review in the
NY Review of Books
); his taking out the
Voice
ad (which I trust you’ve seen) with his own funds & unbeknownst to me, legend to the contrary; & his subsequent supplying the numerous corrections—I’ve now no idea how many, perhaps upwards of 40 or 50—of typos, my own errors, dropped lines &c, which were incorporated in the Meridian (& English) editions & none since: in other words a serious champion not of me (as the bone in the jaws of today’s blurb world has it but of course may have always: have you ever come across Amanda Roos’
Bayonets of Bastard Sheen
?), but of a piece of work.

(Though, for a diversion, how in heaven’s name can be explained the
New
Republic
’s embrace of so pitifully awkward, vulgar, artless, amateurishly (in the pejorative sense) egregious (do.) an item as
A Confederacy of Dunces
, as “one of the finest books ever written”! & again, ! ! ! ! ! The more things change &c. . .)

I’ve got some questions here from Kuehl which I hope to do some blunt kind of justice to before leaving in 3 weeks for a couple of months during which I wish you good luck with your enterprises,

with best regards

William Gaddis

PS it did occur to me, in the realm of perverse self promotion (as the item itself clearly is), should you find useful for cover? jacket? illustration/design &c purposes (as opposed to Knopf’s bleary snapshot) for your collection of pieces on my work, to suggest the line ‘drawing’ included in Burt Britton’s
Self Portrait / Book People Picture Themselves
(Random House 1976, paper) which apparently Kuehl hadn’t seen; preferably as is but should there be copyright threat I could send you a repeat ‘original’.

Amanda Roos’
Bayonets of Bastard Sheen
: Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939) is celebrated for being a terrible writer;
Bayonets
is a book of extracts from her letters, privately printed by T. S. Mercer in 1949.

A Confederacy of Dunces
: posthumously published first novel by John Kennedy Toole (1937– 69), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980; reviewed by Phelps Gay in the 19 July 1980 issue of the
New Republic
(who called it one of the “funniest” books ever written, not “finest.”) WG later had a change of heart and praised portions of the novel in
AA
(63–66).

Burt Britton’s
Self Portrait
: in the end, WG supplied a version of the same drawing for the cover of
In Recognition
.

To Tomasz Mirkowicz

New York NY 10021

9 January 1982

Dear Tomasz Mirkowicz.

I received your card and message this morning and of course in view of what we read in the papers here of conditions in Poland was very happy to hear from you.

Anders is probably back among you & so has let you know of our very pleasant relaxed visit with him in the country & that I found the magazines he brought along most intriguing, even to seeing the page of Gibbs’ notes meticulously translated and pasted up in Polish!

To your query regarding arrangements for an edition in Polish of
The Recognitions
, our picture at this moment of the situation there is unclear enough that I might imagine for all your generous intentions circumstances have changed since you sent your proposal. I can only say now therefore that should it still be possible to work out I would have no objection whatever to payment in ‘blocked’ zlotys, if you will only when the time comes let me know the amount involved (a matter which I know is not in your control).

My only request would be this: that on the chance some other member of my family might find it possible to visit Poland when I might not, that such an account be set up so that could be drawn upon by not only myself but any of the following who might show up first:

Matthew Gaddis; Sarah Gaddis Conley; Muriel O Murphy.

The prospect of my work appearing there is rather a marvelous one to me (as has been even its following in English) and I greatly appreciate all of your efforts. You must know that through the haze of confusion here about conditions in Poland day to day, we think of you often and hope that your own lives and work are going on as well as can be possible and how greatly we admire your spirit in these difficult times.