B007RT1UH4 EBOK (45 page)

To Edith Gaddis

Paris

[? November 1950]

dear Mother,

Just a note to thank you immensely for all your trouble over the player. Of course the
Atlantic
note delighted me, and made for an extremely pleasant evening. (I’d dinner with Juancho at that Roger the Frog place, where we went you remember & it was so crowded that they carried a fainting girl out, returned for lunch next day?) So I’ll hang on and wait for
Atlantic
, there’s nothing could be more wonderful though I doubt that he (Morton) can get a unanimous agreement from his staff on it. If it won’t do, then, could you send it to
American magasine
?

Look, Congdon never sent that thing around, I’m certain. And what the devil is he agrieved about? Really, agents agrieved over expense-account liquor at the 21, I can’t take it seriously. The last thing I’ve written and tried to sell was the story from Madrid, which I sent him, and he didn’t make any effort for. Since then I’ve written nothing finished. (While I think of it, I believe I tried the player at
Esquire
, Chandler was working there then.) I’ll wait to hear from Congdon, we can have a correspondence. It is nice of him to tell everybody I’m good, but what the devil. I’ve nothing to sell now. When I finish the thing I’m trying to work on now, then there will be matter for talk. Or being agrieved. You’re awfully good to be so patient in the middle of it. I do get truculent sometimes. As you know.

(Incidentally, if anyone should take the player, there’s material in the last paragraph which must be checked, probably changed; v., mention of the rolls Macy’s sells, & the price, which may be different; also mention of a Mr Carlton Chase, who may be dead by now, things like that.)

I didn’t go to the dentist yesterday for the extraction, I was in a terrible state of exhaustion and that would have been the End. I’m going next Wednesday. Right before Thanksgiving. Lord lord. You’re awfully kind about wanting to pay it. (Apparently English dentists are famous for being the most dangerous and bad in the world. All thumbs.) (Yes I do think Jean-Jacques Stoffel is a good dentist. Charming fellow.)

That’s all for this moment. Oh things are in a state. Not bad. Just busy. Wheatland, who’s just gone to NY for a few days, left me his yellow MG (the car we went to Madrid in), and tomorrow I hope to drive to a monastery somewhere beyond Chartres for a day of quiet, and music. I do look seedy but I’m really quite well.

with love,

W.

Atlantic
note: this note stated that the magazine would
consider
publishing the essay, but was not an acceptance (this wouldn’t occur until February 1951).

Roger the Frog: Roger la Grenouille, a well-regarded restaurant in Paris, still taking reservations today.

the 21: the 21 Club in midtown Manhattan, also still in business.

Mr Carlton Chase: unidentified, nor mentioned in the various available drafts of the essay.

To Edith Gaddis

Paris

28 November 1950

dear Mother,

Lava from Mt Etna, I understand, is flowing at the rate of 120 feet a minute; the United States Atlantic seaboard under 26 feet of water; and the Belgian coast under the heaviest fog in its history. Aside from these prodigies of nature—including a wind of 120 miles an hour on top of Mt Washington in New Hampshire (though what anyone is doing up there I haven’t figured out)—we have such ingenuous contributions of human origin as the Long Island Railroad, and the little girl with the sunflower growing in her lungs. Fortunately the Pope has proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption, so I suppose there’s really nothing to worry about. (They say that the bubonic plague has re-appeared in north-Africa.)

In times like these, a small person returns to his own pitifully limited means of accomplishing disaster; and the best one can accomplish is lampshades of human skin, or soap made of human bones. Recalling the crucifix at Burgos (in the north of Spain), where for many centuries it was believed that the Figure was made of human skin, though eventually someone proved it to be buffalo hide. There was also, somewhere in the annals of the entertainment world, a mermaid presented at sideshows fashioned from the upper half of a monkey and the lower end of a codfish. Bringing us back to the world of Freddie’s Football Dogs, and the play
The Deserter
(presented in London in the late 19th century) entirely acted by animals.

Material, one might say, for a novel.

Speaking of novels, I’ve the author of something called
Love Me Sailor
settled here in the back room. He is an Australian, and if you know any Australians that’s enough said. Very nice fellow. It seems his book is going to be a real Best Seller.

Thanksgiving was very pleasant. Not turkey, but rabbit with a mustard sauce. Mathilde was ill, and husband Clements trying to go to a dinner party in a cream-coloured sports shirt; so I was asked over to keep her company, which I did, enjoyably, in just such a frame as people think a young man’s life in Paris should be—the lovely lady with red hair cascading to her waist, and the small table set for two in the bedroom before a fireplace and a fire. And so I made a number of grogs, buttered rum, and the evening went on for some time, when Clements returned with a red carnation because it was his name day, St Clement. The tooth gave little bother, though its old niche is still sore.

I think the notion of sending the player to William B Hart (of the Hopalong Cassidy Harts?)(or red-Heart dogfood?) is excellent, if
Atlantic
can’t use it. Of course I’m still here hoping.

HG Wells said, somewhere, —We seem to go through life waiting for something to happen, and then . . . it doesn’t happen. I am waiting for something to happen; though as might be said quite justly, isn’t Mt Etna, the LIRR, and 26 feet of snow enough for you? No.

Yes, I did get a pleasant enough note from Congdon. I’m going to write him now, telling him that if I sell the player piano anywhere he is not going to get any %. $. %”_#&$(%*@@@@¾¾!) He doesn’t know why he hasn’t had a letter from me. What would I write him about? I’ve nothing finished to sell. I’ve two ideas that I want to ask him about. If he thinks they are good or worth($) while, maybe we can recover our lost intimacy. Otherwise I shall continue to play Greensleeves on the recorder, in the Gardens of Spain.

In spite of my pretentiously erudite references, Burgos and Freddie’s Football Dogs, this isn’t a very intelligent letter. Is it.

I’m glad you found Ormonde entertaining and reassuring. It’s some days since I’ve heard from Margaret. I don’t know what she’s up to? Perhaps on the High Seas, cast perilously adrift on a raft of her own fashioning between Woodmere and Greenpoint. Or forging ahead, Scott of the Antarctic. (I read recently that a Exquimo was eaten by his sledge dogs—news from Copenhagen.)

You were extremely kind to send me make-up money for the dentist, and the news that my bank balance is undisturbed. Unfortunately I can never present you with a Toothpaste Smile, because my teeth just won’t be pearly, they haven’t got it in them. But they are clean, and serve to ruminate what crusts come my way.

And so, recently, I study about old Flemish painters, having reached a snag in my work, which, since it concerns a man who is forging paintings (it is his father who is counterfeiting a religion, that’s why I needed
Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity
), I must know more of than I do. And so, in my mind this wet Paris morning, I have only pictures of St Barthemew being skinned alive, proof, perhaps, that the mediaeval imagination was as equal to conceiving outdoor sports commensurate with its capabilities as our own.

Be to her Persephone, All the things I might not be;

Take her head upon your knee,

My dear, my dear, It’s not so dreadful here

One wonders where to fit Leda and the Swan into all this.

Unless the lava flows northward, or Margaret eastward, I hope to be in London by mid-December. More of that, though, in December. Meanwhile I also stand and wait.

love from your son,

W.

dogma of the Assumption: on 1 November 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed as dogma the belief that the Catholic goddess Mary ascended bodily into heaven upon dying (discussed in
R,
922–23).

lampshades [...] human bones: such atrocities were committed by the Nazis in their concentration camps.

crucifix at Burgos [...] codfish: repeated almost verbatim on p. 16 of
R.

Freddie’s Football Dogs [...]
The Deserter
: in her rambling letter to Dr. Weisgall in
R,
Agnes Deigh writes, “I remember The Deserter, a drama acted by dogs and a monkey at Sadlers Wells in 1785, and I could weep. I remember Freddies Football Dogs, and I could weep. [...] Somewhere in Africa I believe they made a mermaid from a monkey and a codfish, I have seen its photograph” (760).
The Deserter
is a 1773 opera by Charles Dibdin (1745–1814), based on
Le deserteur
(1779) by Monsigny and Sedaine. Freddie’s Football Dogs was presumably a novelty act, otherwise unidentified.

Love Me Sailor
: Close’s novel, about the adventures of the only woman aboard a rough ship, was first published in Australia in 1945—and became the subject of an obscenity suit—then in United States in 1950, and often reprinted. Early in the novel, the protagonist has “bent against the table to eat,” and the narrator comments, “I knew her breasts would feel like two warm duck eggs” (10), a line Jack Gibbs recalls in
J R
(281).

Mathilde [...] Clements: Mathilda Campbell (1925–97), the American-born 4th Duchess of Argyll, whom WG had known since Harvard when she attended Radcliffe. She married Clemens Heller in 1945.

William B Hart: an editor at the
American Magazine
.

HG Wells [...] it doesn’t happen: untraced.

LIRR: Long Island Railroad.

Greensleeves: traditional English folk song.

Scott of the Antarctic: title of a 1948 film about Robert Scott’s failed attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole (1910–12).

St Barthemew being skinned alive: perhaps
The Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew
by the Flemish-influenced German painter Stefan Lochner (1400–1452).

Be to her Persephone: from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Prayer to Persephone” (1921).

I also stand and wait: from a line in Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness”: “They also serve who only stand and wait” (
ODQ
).

To Helen Parker

Paris

1 December 1950

dear Helen.

You know there’s no excuse for the weeks I’ve let go by without answering the letter I was so pleased to find here when I came back from Barcelona. Except the constant round of monkey-business, which never ends here. Enough like New York, except that getting in and out of trouble is less expensive, and any variety these days only brings wide eyes, or the hand that shakes slightly reaching out in greeting. Lord, lord. And poor weather.

First I must tell you how glad I was to hear that you’ve got a house, and far from the Underground. I’ve asked many enough people about you, in these last two years, but any reports were vague and random. But how I have wondered what you were doing, and where, and with whom. And how happy to learn, at least, that you’re in the country. Or was that only in the summer? And have you got this letter forwarded, reading it in that New York now?