B007RT1UH4 EBOK (131 page)

and love to you both,

Willie

Albemarle catalogue: published to coincide with Napper’s exhibit at the Albemarle Gallery in London, 16 October–22 November 1991.

“a fool [...] travel for it too”: so says Rosalind in
As You Like It
, 4.1.25–26.

a little wine for the stomach’s sake: “for
thy
stomach’s sake,” 1 Timothy 5:23 (quoted in
R,
24).

To Erika Goldman

[
An editor at Scribner’s who requested a blurb for John Aldridge’s
Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction
(1982), on American fiction of the 1980s, including WG’s.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

7 November 1991

Dear Erika Goldman.

Thank you for sening me John Aldridge’s
Talents and Technicians
.

I don’t write (or seek) jacket blurbs but in this case think you & certainly John Aldridge would agree in the light of his long generous appraisal of my work, renewed in these pages, it could appear especially self serving & in fact prove counterproductive.

Well, that said, I read it straight through with pleasure & bleats of satisfaction, a very much needed corrective succinctly putting forth what many feel but haven’t had his patience in actually examing the material & bearing down with critical intelligence, right from the earliest pages’ vital distinction between critics & reviewers & the latters’ encroachment upon or rather displacement of the former in our current ‘literary’ climate which seems to have gone unremarked for the major deleterious factor it has willy nilly become.

My own patience with the material under fire here was provoked by curiosity & exhausted quite early with a try at Raymond Carver’s ‘story’ about the birthday cake, manipulated sentimentality &c & I looked in vain in these pages’ exploration of the self fulfilling/defeating plague of Teaching Creative Writing—my own brief & depressing foray among undergraduates to witness—for the debt Carver apparently felt to a major minimalist in terms of talent John Gardner whose numbing infuence seems to persist beyond the grave.

Taken altogether, Aldridge’s thesis recalls to me lines of a poet (Roy Campbell?) of generations ago as ‘They use the bridle and the curb all right, but where’s the bloody horse?’

Good luck with publishing the book & please give John Aldridge my best personal regards when you are in touch with him,

yours,

William Gaddis

Carver’s ‘story’: “A Small, Good Thing” (in
Cathedral
[1983]), regarded as one of his finest efforts.

Roy Campbell: Anglo-African poet (1901–57). His poem ‘On Some South African Novelists” (1930) begins: ‘You praise the firm restraint with which they write—/ I’m with you there, of course: / They use the snaffle and the curb all right, / But where’s the bloody horse?”

To Susan Barile

[
Barile planned to open a bookstore called “Noted with High Regard Though Seldom Read” (after the last line of
R
), and wanted WG to read at the store’s opening, but the store never came to be. She was working at Gotham Book Mart at this time, whose rare-book department was curated by Andreas Brown, mentioned below.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

13 November 1991

Dear Ms. Barile.

I apologize for being so late about answering your inquiry & generous estimate of my work.

To the ‘readings’: I avoid giving them (& sitting through them) but appreciate your invitation. The one at the luncheon out here in the spring was a local library benefit & a favour to a friend, & as far as that goes I didn’t read from my but Dostoevski’s work, a long comic scene of a literary luncheon fete in
The Possessed
. I do recall talking with your friend there & sorry to hear about your illness deferred bookstore project but certainly the Gotham should fill the bill as it always has done & of course it’s pleasing to hear of the inquiries for my books & your efforts on their behalf.

The
Village Voice
piece came as a happy surprise to me & did in fact elicit inquiries from ½ dozen publishers, still fiddling with Viking/Penguin over whether they’ll renew their imminently expiring license or sign off, given the chaotic state of publishing Lord knows the outcome but I hope to in a week or so.

Please too give my best regards to Andreas Brown who gave me generous advice some years ago on the equally mad area of my ‘archives’ on which I’ve still taken no action except to relentlessly add to it as this present work trundles on at my usual overburdened glacial pace.

with kind regards

William Gaddis

To Ann Patty

[
Publisher (1953– ) and Editorial Director of Poseidon Press, which she founded in 1982. After Allen Peacock left Simon & Schuster,
FHO
was passed along to her. Poseidon went under in 1993;
FHO
, published on 17 January 1994, was one of its last titles.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

13 September ’92

Dear Ann Patty,

thank you for your letter (lately reached me at this address) & its kind wish for a ‘lovely summer’ which in fact turned out quite otherwise, the only lasting & pertinent item to emerge from the chaos being that the book has not prospered as much as I’d hoped & intended but I now have some 200 pages beyond what you have in your folder & its plotless plot right now reaching a boiling point: would you care to see it?

And thank you for the Erickson book whose story interests me (what a time Quayle would have with the situation!) which I’ve put aside for the moment though for the record I’ve never written a ‘blurb’ (& don’t solicit them) so that won’t affect its sales not that it would.

Oh I would pray for the fall ’93 publication date you mention for me though God knows the gaps between even the completed text & that grand moment (especially borne in upon me by Penguin’s next-summer note for
The
Recogntitions
&
J R
in their Classic Series with the corrected film already in hand from the earlier ed.).

Well back to work

with best regards

W Gaddis

Erickson book: Steve Erickson’s
Arc
D’X
(1993), a surreal dystopian novel.

Quayle: American politician, vice president under the first Bush (1989–93) and the subject of a squib by WG that had just appeared in the August issue of
Esquire
(
RSP
114).

To Gregory Comnes

[
For the visit WG refers to, see headnote to 5 November 1988. Comnes had finished revising his dissertation and sent a copy to WG.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

15 October 1992

dear Greg Comnes,

indeed I remember your visit (& at risk of sounding rude more for that breathtaking beauty in your company than, say, Walter Benjamin) but had not counted on the extraordinary issue from it that you have sent me, in the shape of Agapē Agape & Indeterminacy, & am struck & gratified by the argument grasped & glossed in your accompanying letter regarding “how, if at all, being moral had any legitimacy in the postmodern world” & “the willingness of people to act without the sanction of absolutes” all of which, I believe, continue to occupy (read “obsess”) me to an even further (read “despairing”) degree in my 500+ page work in hand which opens with the fine old saw “You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law” trying desperately now to surface from the deluge of my usual vastly overresearched material to wind the thing up for “another damned, thick, square book.”

Thus in no particular order: I hadn’t meant to “fuss” over your allusions to Walter Benjamin: it has been remarked elsewhere his obvious influence on my work & thought though—as I must have told you to my embarrassment—I hadn’t known of him, & certainly would have been pilloried for plagiary had I ever completed by own
Agap
ē
Agape
:
the
Secret History of the Player Piano
which became (cf. Gibbs) a casualty of overresearch; but then of course in my ignorance Benjamin had already clearly, concisely, brilliant & briefly covered the ground.

And thus in this mixture of frustration & revelation we constantly find ourselves preempted by those “selves who could do more” and did, as Frank on the greatest of them: “Not to believe in God and immortality, for the later Dostoevski, is to be condemned to live in an ultimately senseless universe; and the characters in his great novels who reach this level of self awareness inevitably destroy themselves because, refusing to endure the torment of living without hope, they have become monsters in their misery.” (& to see this rambunctious agony played out in our own time stagger through the marvelous new Stannard biography of Evelyn Waugh vol. 2)