B007RT1UH4 EBOK (88 page)

I want to get back out there before summer collapses & would hope to see you again (having of course by then read
Maiden
), if only to confirm your right arm which I can’t find in that stunning dust jacket photograph, very disturbing.

best regards

W. Gaddis

Sherry: John Sherry (1923–99), novelist, poet, and playwright, and a friend since the 1950s. WG refers to him as “The Sage of Sag Harbor” in
FHO
(75). After WG died, Sherry wrote “In Recognition: Remembering William Gaddis,”
Hamptons Country
, June 1999, 76–80.

To John and Pauline Napper

Piermont NY 10968

24 August 1977

Dear John & Pauline,

Thanks for your note & I too should have written sooner but have been having a rather low time since I saw you last: could you believe that that evening we came to your show & went on to take Judith to the airport, that I did not see her again till about 3 weeks ago. She was in Key West, trying to sort out what she wants (this ‘freedom’ women that age are into these days), I had no idea of a separation till it prolonged itself to almost 5 months of straight hell at this end. She’s been back staying with her mother across the river, we’ve had a few agonized conversations & she’s going back to K.W. tomorrow to, again, try to figure out what she wants, I’d hoped we could pull it together but now have a good deal less of hope than a few weeks ago but know I cannot go on living this dangling drinking life too much longer. [...]

WG’s home, the carpenter gothic house he shared with his wife Judith in Piermont, New York.

Sorry to load the above on you & wish to heaven I had brighter news, my God will the day ever come! I will be teaching 2 days a week at Bard College again this fall trying to get a little out of debt & my damned teeth fixed —things you know all about at first hand but be glad you don’t know everything about life at first hand that I do. [...]

Willie

To David Madden

[
American novelist and critic (1933– ), for decades a professor at Louisiana State University. Madden wrote one of the earliest appreciations of
R
(in
Rediscoveries
, 1971), and in September 1977 sent WG a draft of an essay later published in a reference book entitled
American Novelists since World War II
(Gale Research, 1978, 2:162–70). Earlier Madden had sent WG a copy of his critically acclaimed novel
Bijou
(1974).
]

Piermont

16 September 1977

Dear David Madden.

I did get your novel
Bijou
& am sorry to have waited for the provocation of this last mailing to write & thank you for sending it. I’ve put off everything till after Labor Day & now everything is here including pulling myself together to teach at Bard again this fall, so between reading for that I’ve taken quick looks into your book & of course am caught by its nowhere-but-America theme (if that is I’ve grasped it in such glimpses) & look forward to reading it through.

I had no idea the piece for this Gale publication would be so extensive. Beyond any writer’s natural thin-skinnedness, I don’t see anything I’d call distortions (having, indeed, survived John Gardner’s sloppily confused & error-ridden tendentious review in the
NY Review of Books
), & while the following looks long and carping I stress only that all the below are simply for your consideration (though a few are fact changes) to include or not as you see fit, despite the peremptory style:

[
Some two dozen comments keyed to Madden’s page numbers follow, most minor (“for ‘1952’ read ‘1951’”), but a few worth quoting, beginning with a query regarding Madden’s interpretation of Wyatt’s activities at the end of R.
]

• (note: is he ‘restoring’ or simply scraping paintings down to the canvas, tabula rasa, for a fresh start)

• for ‘His mother sleeps all the time’ read ‘His mother, who is a nurse, comes and goes and sleeps at odd times’ or some such. (note: this is an important point, that in any real terms
J R has no family, in effect (& in contrast to Bast) no past: he is all present, the moment. As you note later (p. 23), The surface is all.)

• (note: this is one of those difficult instances of the writer’s intentions vs. the reader’s impression, the sort that provokes some writers to send indignant letters (‘May I be permitted to point out to your reviewer that on page 000 &c) to book reviews, as I have always resisted doing. The reader, even George Steiner in the
New Yorker
review, is welcome to his impression however distorted it pleases him to make it; & as I think even Wyatt may have said somewhere there’s no way to follow one’s work around saying ‘but this is what I meant . . .’ Either the work says it or it doesn’t.

So in this case, as an obviously careful & sympathetic reader your impression may well reflect my failure to make a point clearly, or rather my tendency to make it obliquely; but in Bast’s defense, after his garbled realization (p. 687) that he doesn’t ‘have to’ write music (as a burden carried from the past), his ambitions have diminished through the book from his initial opera through cantata, suite, to at last the piece for unaccompanied cello (p. 675) which he desperately rescues from the wastebasket as he leaves the hospital (p. 718) as signifying his realization that if he is going to fail it will be with his own work not that of others, if there is damage it will be his own.

Thus Bast’s outcry at the end (p. 725) to Eigen, seeking this same unfinished score in the trash heap of unfinished & never-to-be-finished work of Eigen’s/Gibbs’/Schramm’s generation, consigns all their unrealised ambitions to trash for the very fact of being unrealized, the direction his own ambitions have been headed & from which he is now desperately intent on rescuing them (not, in fact, unlike Wyatt’s fresh start at the end of
The Recognitions
, having been through the crucible.)

• (note: as a matter of possible interest you may have remarked & dismissed: this ‘who uses whom’ thesis is pervasive in
J R
& obsessional in
The Recogntions
where Wyatt, as the flawed creative force (as reduced as Bast) is the missing part others seek to use, from Valentine to Sinisterra at the end.)

I must say I’m impressed by the Bibliography you’ve assembled, may be missing some minor items but has some I didn’t know of. [. . .] I hope all the foregoing doesn’t sound too carping, I don’t mean to contest your interpretation & as I say you are certainly free to make what use what you want of it; which is to say that I do greatly appreciate the work & care you’ve put into it, if only it will enable me to refer people who write me for such information to it without having to rehearse the whole thing each time myself. Is there some definite date for publication?

Thanks again for letting me see it,

all best regards,

William Gaddis

‘who uses whom’: a question posed by Vladimir Lenin and quoted both in
J R
(486) and in WG’s Saul Bellow review (
RSP
74).

To John Napper

Piermont

13 October 1977

Dear John.

I know how much time & thought & feeling went into your letter & to say I appreciate it is thin stuff —in fact if there is one real revelation & awfully good thing that’s got to me in this entire mess it’s been the marvelous importance of friends, in which I’m terribly fortunate —I don’t mean simply as people to deluge with one’s troubles, but some closer look at what friendship’s all about & which may, in the last analysis (which one thinks about these autumn days), be the only thing in this turbulent world worth the having. In fact Judith’s been away for so damned long by this time (since the end of February) that she’s rapidly becoming rather an idea than a person. Still a terribly quiet house & somehow a chilly one, wash out one’s shirts, cook for 1, nobody to share the small great things of life with like the turning of the leaves, nobody but the fool cat stamping about & shouting for his supper while the porch steps collapse & I add that project to my list of things undone, invitations to stylish openings unattended in favour of sitting here with a glass of whisky & wishing I could write a maudlin popular song (viz. one current: ‘The windows of the world are covered with rain . . .’), you see what I mean. But frankly there is also a modicum of comfort in the sense of one less person to disappoint, a personal extension of the collapse of the Protestant Ethic which I suppose is my eventual obsession.

And so nothing at all in your letter looking sympathetically at these girls’ & women’s plight annoys me or upsets me, I understand it & know it’s all true, that one ‘can’t stand still & protected behind someone else’, that ‘love must be free from dependence’ &c &c, & that in essence it’s as difficult if not more so for them (Judith) as for us (me) to be participants in this historic watershed between the madness of the Judeo-Christian oppression & what’s ever ahead, where surely the Buddhist approach you note must have a place if we are to survive at all.

And yet. And yet. All the interlaced guilt in the P.E. notwithstanding these concepts of personal responsibility that come down with it, mangled as they have become, are a central fact I cannot escape (unless of course, op. cit., some one else’s action gives me ‘one less person to disappoint’). There’s Matthew for instance, he’s come up with some bad numbers but got through them & right now is working a 9 hour day in a Boston restaurant & taking 2 evening classes at Harvard, & even though I think it will prove too much for him to handle a great deal of what he’s trying to do emerges from almost 20 years of me as his father & I can’t see, or even seek, any alternative to another 3 or 4 years of tuitions though I cannot presently imagine how I can meet them. Sarah got into & did well at the excellent school & the excellent college I herded her toward over years of deplorable circumstances, now is working in a furniture store & planning a marriage in March as no nickel-&-dime affair; again I cannot imagine how I shall pay for it but the point is that it is all an extension & an entirely logical one of her concept of my concept of her as a person. Of course it’s different children & wives; but once one grants that inhowfar different is it?