B007RT1UH4 EBOK (71 page)

And
to tell you you must call, wire, come, if things, pressures, get too disproportionate won’t you—including $ (and use the enclosed just to keep you in balance until I see you)—though for the moment 2 days’ a week work may not be unrealistic, may allow you a little more freedom at home—the horoscopes keep insisting how splendid everything is for us, and that means work I guess, you to fight off the difficulties in your situation there, toward work; I to fight off the attractions in mine here, toward work; and toward seeing you Sunday night, barring disaster.

yours, with you know what and you know why

W.

Judith Gaddis and WG, Saltaire, late 1960s.

To Carolyn Kizer

[
American poet (1925– ) who in 1966 became the first director of Literary Programs for the newly created National Endowment for the Arts. The paragraph below WG’s signature was apparently typed on a carbon of his “official” letter of acceptance.
]

Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. 10520

[late 1966]

Dear Miss Kizer.

You may imagine I am immensely gratified at being among the writers awarded grants in literature by the National Endowment for the Arts, and will be more than pleased to make reports as requested on my progress on this work which I can now hope to complete with the assistance of this grant.

Although some years have already gone into this work-in-progress it is, as I think often chronic among writers, behind the schedule I had originally intended for it; and my work on it this spring will be sporadically interrupted by a part-time teaching invitation which I had accepted in order to continue work on the book. I trust this will not affect the provisions and administering of the grant as set forth in Mr Stevens’ letter, but should it appear to the payment dates of the grant might be moved ahead from the present January-April-July-October 1967, to July-October (1967)-January-April (1968).

In any case, since the work-in-progress is taking me longer than intended, be assured that the grant funds will be used in the manner and for the purpose set forth, as indicated by the enclosed carbon which I have signed with great gratitude.

Yours,

William Gaddis

Carolyn —as you can see from this letter I decided that it might make more sense simply to accept the grant as proposed, but felt the part-time teaching item should be mentioned to keep the record clear and avoid gross complications, as it were. I hope this makes sense to you and that you can proceed, without further concern for my confusions, with things as they stand in Mr Stevens’ letter. Do let me know, I earnestly hope I haven’t injected my own uncertainties which are now largely resolved. & now: to ‘work apace, apace, apace. /Honest labour bears a lovely face.’

Mr. Stevens: Roger L. Stevens (1910–98), a theater producer and the first chairman of the National Edowment for the Arts.

‘work apace [...] lovely face’: from Thomas Dekker’s 1599 play
Patient Grissil
(
ODQ
).

To Jack P. Dalton

[
See 27 September 1963. After Dalton saw Bernard Benstock’s essay on Gaddis’s alleged debt to Joyce, he asked WG’s permission to quote his earlier note in a letter he later sent to the editor of
Contemporary Literature
, who never printed it.
]

Croton-on-Hudson NY

19 March 1967

Dear Mr. Dalton.

Thanks for your note. You’ve my permission to publish that 1963 note if you like, though rereading it now I wonder, did I read
Portrait of the Artist
in college? or read in it? and if it matters? since it could I assume scarcely affect such observations as “the correspondences continue to accumulate toward a definitive theory of imitation and conscious borrowing” (from
Ulysses
). I saw and of course was most intrigued by the results of Mr Benstock’s ingenuity, as I was by a Master’s thesis I once saw in which the candidate drew similarly appallingly precise parallels with
Nightwood
(though albeit blessed with a far from photographic memory, I’d read that one).

Maybe Joyce read people like the I assume now quite forgotten Andrew Lang too? and we’ve become victims of the common misapprehension of Darwin’s common ancestor for ape and man emerging as man descended from the ape. Regarding the whole thing I’m ever more convinced that such matters are best dealt with posthumously, and have scarcely swerved from my feelings when I wrote pp 95–6 of
The Recognitions
. Finally regarding Joyce’s
Ulysses
I’ve still not read it but can now enter any discussion with the bravura of “. . . but I’ve seen the movie.”

Yours,

William Gaddis

Andrew Lang: Scottish author of
Custom and Myth
(1884) and
Magic and Religion
(1901), two of WG’s sourcebooks for
R.

the movie: Joseph Strick’s film version appeared in 1967.

To Judith Thompson

Tues. pm [April? 1967]

My Whole World:

how you’ve saturated my life, there’s not a corner anywhere inside or out where I don’t find you waiting, and not there, from that yawning half of Altnaveigh’s bed to the hot-dog cart on 9A where I pass hungry & daren’t stop, I know I’d choke, to Storrs’s theatre showing last night
Blowup
, without you ergo w/out me, I couldn’t pull a Jablow on you, instead accepted dinner from the people who had me last week named Davis in part I think because she felt her last week Tetrazzini (sp?) was dry & lacking & didn’t want me to carry that impression around when she could & did serve a fine Bourgognionne (damned French) & I left at a decent hour, back to Altnaveigh where the old dog came right into the room & went to sleep under the bed. Cold comfort but I thought it was terribly thoughtful of him to know how much I missed you & try in his own way to help.

The [camping] trip? Oh Lord, the trip. [...] But, we did cook over a fire, cut wood, sleep 3’’ off the floor, toss marshmallows to raccoons at night, light kerosene lanterns, & I guess pretty generally do all the things we’d have done if we had really been penniless, illiterate, & never amounted to anything back in the hills. I love you. Though it began with our arriving in Washington early enough to go to the Lincoln Memorial & walk around, then out to visit a friend of mine named MacDonald who is with the Office of the Chief of Military History & will probably be in charge of the official history of Vietnam, all that strained because of under-current battle between him & his wife, charming British exballet dancer but Lord you cannot know other people’s marriages and Lord! I thought of us & I thought never! never! we can never let that happen. [...]

Too possibly what follows will sound like I’m doing everything to evade work, but it’s really trying to get things long postponed done, a note from Arabelle Porter asking how things were going so I will face her Friday lunch [...]. And if manageable expect to go into town tomorrow night or so to talk with this fellow Moore about the most denigrating ways a composer can make a living, to get Edward Bast back on the tracks.

And you, you . . . can’t bear this letter writing business because mine are so marvelous! they’re not, no, and I almost think it would be terrible if we became adept, exchanged sparkling & accomplished correspondence, things mustn’t get to that point! No, our letters have to stay awkward & just blundering around I love you and I miss you to extinction & don’t dare destroy another word you write me, if you knew how since we talked Sun I’ve waited to get back & get your letter, & how I love your letters, especially this with its enclosure, in today’s mail and what a packet: a letter regarding father’s estate; Pfizer’s Annual Report; Special Money-Saving Certificate for 27 Capital Gain Stocks; solicitation to buy a book “like nothing else that has ever appeared in North America, the secrets of African Sex revealed to you for the first time!” and another containing (also For the First Time) “Over 210 photographs of coital positions!” (this one a product of “Renowned Oriental doctors”); and eighteen fragmentary manuscripts totaling 79 pages (“I’d like you to read the few stories that I enclosed and to give me your opinion of them . . .”) from Adrian Grunberg of West 189th st, of whom I had heretofore been unaware (“He was walking on a hot desert road. There was no one around for miles and the sun was burning fiercely. Suddenly, like a merciful sign from heaven, two huge female breasts appeared in the sky . . .”) Well Judith, dearest, darling, do you wonder how I fight through such offerings for a glimpse of your writing? how when I find it I put it aside to keep for last, pour tea, sit, can’t wait, don’t, . . . you come first. [...]

And your antiquing, how I thought of you, and your mother, and of you, those 80 miles out into Virginia where it seemed everyone who’d found an old bottle in the cellar and could spell the word had out a sign ‘Antiques’ & I’m sure the practiced eye could have found those seamless lipless bottles we learned bring $50 & heaven knows what else. We’ll do that. And we’ll ransack that place up beyond Storrs. And we’ll . . . oh the things, the things we’ll do!

And, having taken Robt Graves up to Storrs last night, Be bird, be blossom, comet, star, Be paradisal gates ajar, But still, as woman, cleave you must To who alone endures your trust (me).

with you know what & you know why