B007RT1UH4 EBOK (84 page)

Contrary to your information I don’t live in New York and go in only when I have to, but wish you luck with this intriguing enterprise.

Yours,

William Gaddis

To Judith Gaddis

[J R
was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award for fiction, along with Larry Woiwode’s
Beyond the Bedroom Wall
, Saul Bellow’s
Humboldt’s Gift
, Vladimir Nabokov’s
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
, Hortense Calisher’s
Collected Stories
, and Johanna Kaplan’s O
ther People’s Lives
.
]

Piermont

Wednsday 17 March [1976]

Dearest J————

[...] Into fuzzier areas, the one I mentioned to you last night which both Candida and Bob do not appear to attach practical ($) significance to, Bob says for now regard it as an entertainment (my word). Books nominated for the Nat Book Award are mine, Woiwode’s, Bellow’s, then 3 books of stories (!) by Nabokov, Hortense Calisher, and Joanna Kaplan whom nobody’s heard of (Bob published it & can’t understand its inclusion). No
Ragtime
, no
Dead Father
, no
Guerillas
. But if the book selections are odd, the judges are even odder; a writer, a critic, and a complete idiot: Wm Gass, Mary McCarthy, and Maurice Dolbier. The short story books must be Dolbier’s candidates since his attention span is that of a 6 year old and I’m sure he will never reach page 516 in
J R
where D O’Lobeer describes
The Tiger on Sonic
as ‘a really yummy read . . .’ (unless a literate friend if he has any points it out to him). So it’s probably just as well you’re not here pressing me to press Bowdoin to press Mary McC . . . a real comic strip, Bellow has won the NBA 3 times so my money’s on Calisher? [...]

with all love from the 3 of us,

W.

Ragtime
[...]
Guerillas
: novels by E. L. Doctorow, Donald Barthelme, and V. S. Naipaul.

Wm Gass: William H. Gass, eminent fiction writer and critic (1924– ), later to become a dear friend of WG.

Mary McCarthy: see headnote to 4 February 1987. Her third husband was Bowden Broadwater, whose name is mispelled a few lines later

Maurice Dolbier: one of the original reviewers of
R
; see 21 May 1962 and note.

To Matthew Gaddis

[J R
won the National Book Award, and WG attended the ceremony on 21 April with his children, as indicated below. (For coverage of the event and photos of WG, see
Publishers Weekly
, 10 May 1976, 47–54.) The “sheet” is unidentified; Rockland is the county in which Piermont is located.
]

Piermont N.Y.

29 April 76

Dear Matthew,

perhaps I should get out of the book racket, put on my $3 Thrift Shop suit hire John Dalmas as my press agent and go on speaking tours? Heaven knows whether a sheet like this sells any copies in Rockland County though it gets me big smiles at the bank and from Nard (not a reader) —but I am glad you got down for the thing & hope Cindy didn’t find it too cuckoo in the way of everybody going around shaking hands with everybody, a pretty good look at the ‘Establishment’ in action anyhow. Candida says ‘Your kids just knock me out. Now I understand everything.’ And Lee Goerner writes ‘Your family is neat.’ So those are the important things after all.

And in the wake of it things seem to be looking up. There is one deal in the wind I won’t get into here but if it does work out in the next couple of months could relieve these financial uncertainties for a while that I’ve been driving everyone mad with for so long. And then, a little more immediately real, I went up to Bard College yesterday and talked with the president and some people in the English department and they very much would like me up there for the fall term September through December, two courses two days a week at what I think is very good pay and it’s only two hours (90 miles) from here, and the courses would be entirely up to me to make what I wish, which is both flattering and alarming since I’m not all that sure I have enough to ‘teach’ to fill a term. But the Bard people don’t seem at all put off by my doubts and so if I can get over those I will probably take it: certainly a good deal more realistic than sitting here waiting for IBM or Eastman Kodak to call, and would give me time to explore my next project (probably the Civil War one) without feeling I must attack and finish it immediately. Also I have to confess that the title Distinguished Visiting Professor is tempting to wear around for a bit. (Just so Martin [Dworkin] doesn’t hear of it.) [...]

with love to you always and best to Cindy,

Papa

John Dalmas: a private detective in some of Raymond Chandler’s early stories.

Cindy: Matthew’s girlfriend.

Lee Goerner: (1947–95), Gottleib’s assistant at Knopf until he was promoted to publisher. the Civil War one: WG contemplated converting his play
Once at Antietam
into a novel.

To Johan Thielemans

[
A Belgian critic and specialist in American literature who published numerous articles on Gaddis’s work as well as a few radio and television broadcasts for the Belgian media.
]

Piermont NY 10968

18 May 1976

Dear Johan Thielemans.

I greatly appreciate your sending me the copy of your extensive broadcast critique even though, of course, I find the language tantalizingly impenetrable —makes me regret my long fraud with languages that so helped earn the epithet ‘erudite’ for
The Recognitions
(though I’m content to trust that while the author may be a fraud the book is
not
). And in that area I am struck again by the apparently casual ease with which Europeans approach American literature: for another recent case in point, a charming letter from a girl student at the University of Toulouse who has read
J R
twice for a paper on American literature and culture, all which of course I find immensely gratifying as I do your interest in it for the Paris symposium you speak of, I hope your paper is well accepted.

Our own plans for getting to Europe are as usual continuously postponed by circumstance but your invitation is appreciated nonetheless, and thank you again for sending me the paper.

Yours,

William Gaddis

To John and Pauline Napper

Piermont

29 May ’76

dear John and Pauline—thanks for your note—the
Plum Tree
is lovely & a good deal more lasting than the National Book Award which was pleasing of course but doesn’t seem to have had much tangible (i.e. $) effect (i.e. ‘sales’), the book is doing well enough but no vulgar “best seller” and a good deal of peevishness on my part with the publisher over lack of advertising after the string of marvelous reviews. God knows when it will appear in England, my trust-confidence in Tom Mashler at Cape is 0. Otherwise we wait and pray and will give you news when/as/if we ever do have it.

W—

Plum Tree
: perhaps a book in WG’s library: Arthur H. Lewis’s
The Day They Shook the Plum Tree
(Bantam, 1964), a biography of miserly financier Hetty Green (1834–1916), said to be the richest woman in the world in her prime.

Tom Mashler: i.e., Maschler (1933– ), a leading literary publisher in England. No mention of WG in his memoir
Publisher
(2005).

To Candida Donadio

Piermont

1 June 1976

Dear Candida,

As my lawyer (God rest him and I wish he were still with us) used to say, —Oh Lord, you’ve written another of your letters . . . ! Which then, as now, serve largely to get my thoughts in order as we move to the next step. So I’m sending this to Stonington, where you can run through it at leisure when you have nothing worse to do in the next week or so. Mainly at this moment it is because you are out of your office this week, and I am going out to Fire Island sometime in the next few days to work on that house till the 15th, and there are a couple of points I want to have clear in case you should be talking to Knopf or elsewhere in the interim.

First—though I’m sure we think along the same lines and you have anticipated this—I hope we can avoid any quid pro quo with Gottlieb regarding my ‘next book’. In other words, giving up or giving in to something in exchange for his not pursuing any claim to a next book he might have under §14 of our agreement, which reads as amended: The Author agrees to submit to the Publisher his next book-length work before submitting the same to any other publisher. What might we have that he might want? First of course repayment of the $5000. December loan which was excluded from the
J R
contract, and which he has every right to have back off the top of any deal we should make.