B007RT1UH4 EBOK (74 page)

Mr Thompson: Judith’s father.

Our Town:
Thornton Wilder’s popular play (1938), which asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

To David Markson

[
Markson asked WG for a blurb for his novel
Going Down
(1970).
]

Piermont, N.Y.

5 March 1970

Dear David.

Your letter touches on a difficult area, one I have never entirely resolved in anything but practice which is why it has taken me so long to respond.

At the outset though to try to keep up minute-by-minute with the reception of a book that has cost one as much as this one has cost you, let alone to try to take part in it, is plain Chinese water torture, drop by drop, when you are in the most vulnerable position conceivable, quoting the
Library Journal
of all things, ‘suspenseful plot, superb dialogue’, you know it ends up like the psychiatrist being greeted with “Good morning . . .” muttering “What do you think he meant by that?” And hell you know all this, you have neither the body of Jaqueline Suzanne nor the prim crust of a non-adventurer like Capote, and ‘If I were you . . .’ as advice never tires of phrasing it I would lay hands on every available penny take wife and children and pack up, let the book go out and do what it’s going to do anyhow.

My feeling essentially is that a book really goes out on its own, for the human remains that wrote it to run along after it is suicidal since there’s clearly no separating them until the mortal partner drops. I don’t think ‘one decent blurb or two’ is going to alter Asher’s promotion at all, I don’t think lack of them is going to deter it; and the whole God damned area is to me like trying to make magic that will shape a course already implicit and then, if the course takes the feared-for direction, blaming the ex post facto magic, or the lack of it. I’ve never had my name on anybody else’s book jack or ad that I know of, I honestly do not think it would help sell a copy, it reeks a bit of self-advertisement though perhaps, out of a deep mistrust for human motives or rather of them and the abyss between them and their expression this is merely an extreme inverted vanity on my part. Because on the other hand I do admire the generosity of people of stature like, say, Robert Graves, Norman Mailer, TS Eliot writing jacket blurbs for Faber, all of these people quite open-handed. I don’t know. I think of a boy I had at Univ of Connecticut working on a novel which I greatly encouraged, think publishable & have tried to help him place, he’s someone who’s never published and I hope to see have a chance, when/if his book is published, what. I don’t know.

I do marvel at the way in your book you have managed to sustain the tension of atmosphere to a point of shutting out a reader’s day-to-day reality that is eventually any writer’s (real writers) objective. By the same token I don’t believe that phrased for a blurb would sell or not sell. Ask Aaron Asher about my reaction to the string of blurbs on the back of Meridian’s
The Recognitions
; but he was publishing it, a fact for which I am of course eternally grateful, as I was to you for helping to stimulate his interest in it, & as its publisher how he handled things was his business, I told him my feelings & stepped out, & he did a fine job of it.

Are reviewers influenced/cowed by blurbs? and does it matter one simple God damn anyhow? Recall the now quite forgotten ‘critical acclaim’ of the most widely unread best seller of the time,
By Love Possessed
—and reread Dwight MacDonald’s destruction of that review chorus. I as much as any & perhaps more than many am vividly aware of the exaggerated pain of every reviewer’s stab or even patronizing applause; but Jesus Christ looking at it all what’s become of the Hicks Geismars Sterling Norths, nothing left but a whine in the air somewhere. I remain or rather,
The Recognitions
does. So does Lowry’s
Volcano
, so does yours unless you confuse yourself with them is my feeling, if you play their game not your own.

best regards

W. Gaddis

Jaqueline Suzanne: Jacqueline Susann (1918–74), author of
Valley of the Dolls
,
The Love Machine
, and other best-sellers of the time.

Univ of Connecticut: Gaddis taught there for a semester in 1967.

By Love Possessed
: Macdonald’s essay on James Gould Cozzens’s 1957 novel, “By Cozzens Possessed,” appeared in the July 1958 issue of
Commentary
and was reprinted in his book
Against the American Grain
(1962).

Sterling Norths: Sterling North’s insulting review of
R
appeared in the
New York World Telegram & Sun,
10 March 1955, 22.

To William Jovanovich

[
WG wrote to Harcourt, Brace’s president several times in the late 1960s asking for a reversion of rights to his first novel, even offering to buy the rights, without success. The Harvest trade paperback edition of 1970, published without WG’s knowledge, was offset from the first edition, thereby ignoring all the corrections WG had made for the 1962 Meridian edition, and tying up the rights for the foreseeable future.
]

Piermont, NY

15 April 1970

Dear Sir.

You might imagine my dismay on reading in a recent
Times
of your retirement as president of Harcourt, Brace, that I had not waited for your succession by someone less egregiously attached to my novel
The Recognitions
to express my interest in the rights, someone who might, after its 15 years of confinement there, have happily given up a bad job of such historic proportions and allowed us all the possibility of seeing it republished in an attractive cheap edition, both at a profit and a decently fair price to the student audience your back-list feeds upon, and in the corrected version once briefly available.

I have just seen your ‘Harvest’ reissue of the book which would seem finally to preclude realization of these considerations elsewhere, and clearly pretends to none of them itself, especially deplorable in the case of the last mentioned for which there is no responsible excuse whatsoever and apparently no redress but this note which sincerely looks for no response from you, not even still another fatuous recital of your magnanimity in authorizing a $500. general advance those 15 years ago and long since earned back, made even more abject by your most recent gratuitous and quite shabby reference to Bernice Baumgarten in its connection.

William Gaddis

Bernice Baumgarten: the agent who sold
R
to Harcourt, Brace.

To William L. Bradley

[
A scholar and philanthropist (1918–2007), and Assistant Director for Arts and Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1966 to 1971. Coincidentally, Gerald Freund (1930–97), mentioned in the first sentence below, was the director of the MacArthur Foundation’s Prize Fellows Program when WG was awarded one of its “genius” awards in 1982.
]

Piermont, NY

23 July 1970

Dear Mr Bradley.

Following Dr Gerald Freund’s departure for Yale, I understood I might write you concerning the Rockefeller Foundation grant given me over this past year through Vassar College, for the purpose of freeing me to work toward the completion of a work of fiction.

To that end, the grant has accomplished its purpose in a way for which I am eternally grateful, and as its term ends a word of report must be in order. Through the grant, I have been enabled to drop all time-consuming free lance work to concentrate on this book which now, though still short of completion, has 300-odd pages in finished draft, and further portions worked out in the sort of detailed outline I seem to find necessary to write. A passage of some 60 pages of the novel is scheduled for publication in a new review being brought out by E.P.Dutton this fall.

At this stage, considering the liberal nature of the grant and the manner in which it was given, and my uncertainty regarding the general policies and current concerns of the Rockefeller Foundation in this area, it may sound unusual and even impertinent to inquire here about the possibility of requesting an extension of the grant for a further six months’ work on this book. As the hopeful estimate for completing it in the 12-month period of my original grant request was my own, so has been the failure to fulfill it; but I would not want this inquiry to imply that I think the book’s completion will be impossible without a grant extension. Enough of it is now written, and otherwise appears clearly in hand, that I feel reassured about finishing it, though this would take longer with a full return to outside commitments. The only such acceptance I have made is one to give a 2-hour weekly writing class at City College of New York for the fall term (about $2300.), which should allow me almost as much time for this book as I have at present.

If extending the present grant for another six months should be feasible it would be put to as good use and as greatly appreciated as that already received, but I hasten to add that its absence would in no way diminish what I have already been enabled to accomplish, or my lasting gratitude for such an expression of confidence in my efforts.

Yours,

William Gaddis

60 pages [...] in a new review: “J. R. or the Boy Inside,”
Dutton Review
1 (1970): 5–68 (an early version of the first forty-four pages of
J R
).