B007RT1UH4 EBOK (119 page)

Maschler: see note to 29 May 1976.

Gottleib: in 1987 he left Knopf to edit the
New Yorker
.

To Arthur Kerr Brown

[
A student of Elaine Safer, Dr. Brown had written to Gaddis while working on his dissertation “The Past as Prologue: A Study of the Allusive Techniques of John Barth and William Gaddis” (Univ. of Delaware Press, 1989).
]

Wainscott NY 11975

19 July 1987

Dear A.K. Brown.

Thanks for your letter & continuing interest in my work. I don’t know how practicable your notion of getting together to discuss my work may prove to be, after some recent travel I am pretty much settled out here on the tail end of Long Isld making every effort to get down to cases on another book with the usual distractions which I’m trying to keep to a minimum & a long trip from New York (let alone North Chatham) & quite honestly cannot afford the time to get into a correspondence about past work as I trust you will understand. The ‘sources’ of
Carpenter’s* Gothic
seem to me quite evident in the book itself as opposed to other aspects of it (such as the gap between ‘the truth and what really happens’) which, again, I don’t want to elucidate except—as a good example—the query in your PS: the
Boston Globe
is just about as good at getting it right as it was reviewing
The Recognitions
30 years earlier. An entire theme of
Carpenter’s Gothic
embraces getting it wrong, as Paul exemplifies, & in the end Liz is the only person who does get it right & in a world where getting it wrong prevails (‘contras’ = ‘freedom fighters’) she must be eliminated. Of course reading her as a murder victim is nonsense & the most obvious instance of getting it wrong, by the police the papers & your
Globe
reviewer: your interpretation clearly gets it right as numerous evidences plainly there in the text attest.

Let me know if you’ve similar specific queries & I will try to respond in brief, always bearing in mind I feel strongly that eventually the interpretation is the reader’s, that one cannot/should not try to run after a book saying ‘What I really meant was . . .’ &c though the
Globe
interpretation you refer to above was simply too egregious (&, in its way, a
part
of the book itself) to let pass.

Yours,

William Gaddis

*Note the title’s apostrophe, not Carpenters as you have it.

Boston Globe
: Mark Feeney found it “apocalyptic, topical, heavy-handed, a kind of jeremiad.”
R
was unfavorably reviewed in the
Globe
by Edward A. Laycock on 13 March 1955, 72.

To Sarah Gaddis

[Wainscott, NY]

21 July 87

Dear Sarah.

Enfin! The first day in, how long . . . since February I think, of total pace, silence, solitude [...] & here I sit in my air conditioned studio with no obligations in sight but the blank page in the typewriter, a feeling you may now empathise with! And of course all of the recent obligations have been of the best: go to Australia; your visit; isles of Greece . . . perhaps something in my bleak Calvinist soul saying Stop these pleasures! get down to work!

And again, how abruptly the future becomes the past, how the present devours it, how it all speeds up as one grows older: how Australia loomed, how your visit excited, how the Aegean and those Greek islands are now themselves an island in a sea of memory; & how, on that very sea I was already writing you in my head how quickly come and gone your visit here, & did we make the most of it sitting silent, reading in this glass living room, ‘living every, every minute’ as your old favourite
Our Town
had it, & I think we must have. I suppose it is all haunted for me, and so for you & for Matthew, by those fleeting visits & abrupt separations after school Tuesday and Thursday at the old house at Croton (little pies from Ritchie’s homework), the Budin camp, the trip back from Saltaire, the Sunday pm drive from Piermont to that grey Greyhound station in New Haven, in which of course I invested all of my own childhood: the train at Grand Central to Berlin Connecticut age 7 & the desolation of every town along the way as the lights went on: your mother once said in one of her fits of pique & I suppose for good reason —I will not have you living these children’s lives for them! But apparently that’s what we do & perhaps not too bad a thing after all if it does lead to some kind of understanding of our own childhoods & the pain & love of those around us then in their efforts to save us, or better to try to equip us to save ourselves, rehearsing all those cheerful embraces at train stations, bus stations, airports, and the desolation that followed, & the loneliness constantly racked by —Did I do the right thing? As I look back on that winter you put in alone at Pennington & think now How could I have permitted it! And so somehow it all becomes an examination of our childhoods & strangely enough the more so as one grows older—I’ve talked with Saul about it & in fact at this moment Sigrid is in Germany seeking clues to hers—underlying my 4th novel as it does your first: do we want to write novels & simply use this material? or is the attempt to sort all this out what drives us to write them.

Well, speaking of that here’s an item. (CONFIDENTIAL FOR NOW) Louis Auchinloss wants to write a piece on my work (& me) for the
NY Times Magazine
. I know that MHG will howl & you may too! Everything I’ve always avoided, shied from, a few ‘personal details’ &c. HOWEVER. 1) He is a class act, not a celebrity junk journalist a la
Vanity unFair
, real probity, novelist & lawyer, steeped in the world of class, money, Edith Wharton’s world, WASP forthright generous aristocrat & I say all this
not
for its social cachet but for his crisp approach ‘nothing in it for him’, not using me to build his reputation nor his to build mine & not the ‘celebrity’ trip. It springs from his strong feeling that
J R
is one of the great novels in its preoccupation with $/USA & his wish (demand!) that it reach a wider audience, rescue it from the academic critics & deliver it to the Middle Class which the
NYT Magazine
reaches. By the 100 thousands. 2) In the next few months you know I will be offering this next novel (sketch & outline) for a new contract somewhere & a piece such as his could raise the stakes a good deal on the advance, deliver me from being an ‘intellectual’, ‘writers’ writer’, PhD material &c, to the wider audience they seek. (Also one cannot discount the possibility of the illiterate movie people seeing its promise for their $$$ ends.) + his assurance of nothing in the piece I do not want there, which is also to say that you (or MHG) do not want there, so we have time to sort out anything from “He has a daughter who has been living and studying in Paris in recent years” to “While Mr Gaddis takes evident satisfaction in his work, his real pride is reserved for his children. His lovely daughter Sarah, residing in Paris, is completing a much talked about novel already signed with Alfred Knopf, which . . .” (Exactly the stuff Louis would never write but) whatever will make sense to you, point being whatever emerges that your (& MHG’s) accomplishments are your
own
which is true. Anyhow I do honestly think that the time of being the reclusive unapproachable writer is not only over but to press it on could very well appear as a coy play for attention, NOT that you’ll see me (us) playing tag in
People
magazine. Certainly I was reclusive for years & for damned good reason but this seems a time simply to be forthright & here the point which is essential is that Louis is concerned with the
work
itself, not with cute. It’s a matter of a few months & I’ll keep you informed.

And now this (imagine our correspondence gradually becoming writerly exchanges about publishing?): NEWS: Elisabeth Sifton has just left Viking. For KNOPF. And of course I’m a writer she’d like very much to take with her. You’re there. Mehta was strong for
Carpenter’s Gothic
. Gottleib’s OUT. All pretty wild. I don’t expect to make any move for 3 or 4 months & will discuss every step with you beforehand but good Lord at last we may be coming out on top! & again, most primarily & to be preserved for the truth it is as individuals, you for your own efforts & talents, MHG for his, me for mine, & everything I can do to shun the danger you may both see as prospering ‘in my shadow’, ie the kind of crap that the cheap press loves.

To other matters, will you be able to get away from Paris this summer? If not for a long stretch at least for long weekends (taking your work with you), I hope so. I can remember Paris in August as sweltering heat; but of course you have the Bois so it’s not like being locked up in the rue Dauphine where I was.

Out now to lay in a few groceries for the promised appearance of Julia driving out with MHG today or tomorrow wishing of course that you were here now that things have settled down. But our real settling down is I guess settling down to work again, mine the problem of getting started and yours of finishing which is what I would urge upon you, finishing one complete draft even if there are a few rough spots since you can always go back & put things in/take things out but there is a great sense of satisfaction getting that first draft done. However we all work at our own rates & I know there’s no telling someone else what & how to do it, as I know you will.

much love

Papa

desolation of every town along the way: see headnote to 24 October 1933.

Pennington: Sarah lived in Pennington, NJ, during her first marriage.

Saul [...] Sigrid: Saul Steinberg (see headnote to WG’s second letter of 21 January 1990) and his partner, photographer Sigrid Spaeth.

Louis Auchinloss: American novelist, lawyer, and historian (1917–2010). “Recognizing Gaddis” appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
, 15 November 1987, and was reprinted (with new material) as “William Gaddis” in his
The Style’s the Man: Reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Vidal, and Others
(Scribner’s, 1994), 11–25.

MHG: Matthew Hough Gaddis.

Julia: Julia Murphy, Muriel’s daughter.