B007RT1UH4 EBOK (144 page)

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 to 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