B007RT1UH4 EBOK (94 page)

To Stanley Elkin

Piermont NY 10968

12 March 1979

Dear Stanley.

Climbing down from the St Louis high followed by the savoury of Notre Dame with just time at home between courses to wash out some shirts & calm desperate Max the cat, & wade through the otherwise trash heap of mail for
The Living End
: & it certainly is!

Why do we write? out of indignation? outrage? I had thought of pursuing that theme at Notre Dame & planned to pack along Mark Twain’s
Mysterious Stranger
for the purpose till I read yours & thought ah! here’s the news! And only on the plane, culling for inspired passages (‘He doesn’t accept invitations. He doesn’t go out. He stays home nights.’) did it occur to me that this was hardly the forum, hardly my place to divert them from the medium to the message as it would inevitably be interpreted, & so I desisted not, I hope, from cowardice, but . . . what, delicacy? That & trying not to ride (living) coat tails, my next note on these lines to John Macrae III at Dutton explaining I don’t think blurbs sell books any more than reviews do & I’ve never got past the feeling that so many of them are sheer self-advertisement on someone else’s jacket (what keeps the Kazins of this world alive?): God knows I thought of sending Dutton something like “A delicately evocative novel which urges us to lay aside our fears and realize our true strength” but that seemed hazardous for a number of reasons, so I’ve retired to the notion (which I do embrace) that all that sells books, movies & similar aberrations is word-of-mouth & I’ve a busy one as you know; anyhow I can’t believe the book won’t be taken up immediately as slamming the door that Twain opened on eschatology once for all, its street wit is marvelous & its brevity admirable.

All this backing & filling scarcely seems an expression of my real & lasting thanks for all your generosity on every level while I was there, the whole thing helped to restore a feeling of having a place in this world which it seems to take no more than the publication of a book to deprive me of permanently. I noticed that you seem to get around a good deal & if anything brings you east I’d hope you would call, granted I don’t lay a table in a class with Joan’s but the will & the drink would be there; or even if you were just in New York itself I’d race in for a visit.

thanks again to Joan for feeding me &

carting me around & my best to you both,

Willie Gaddis (Capt.)

The Living End
: Elkin’s triptych of novellas, published in 1978, concerning the afterlife.

John Macrae III: Elkin’s editor.

Kazins: critic Alfred Kazin (1915–98) wrote a dismissive review of
J R
in the
New Republic
, 6 December 1975, 18–19.

“A delicately [...] strength”: one of the mock blurbs that appears in
J R
(515).

Joan: Elkin’s wife, a painter.

To Richard Hazelton

[
American medievalist (1918–2009) and professor at Washington University who had written to WG twenty years earlier to express his admiration for
R
.
]

Piermont NY 10968

12 March 1979

Dear Dick,

I’m just finally getting my head together from St. Louis-followed-by-Notre Dame: it’s all enough to seduce one permanently from the drudgery of the keyboard to the parade circuit, given the generosity that greeted me everywhere; it does seem a generation since we cowered under that Arch & ate Mexican & I thank you for all of it. Including dinner with your bright girls: whatever fooleries & futilities one has committed along the way it often seems (to me, having come this far) that a great deal is redeemed if one can point to one’s kids with —There at least is something I did right . . . Do thank them again for me.

That evening brings up another, or rather the only point left unresolved when I fled town. You recall I’d thought we were in for a 35-mile drive both ways for dinner which I looked for as a chance to get at the movies in general & your stab in particular, so failing that dialogue all you have is this mono . . . I don’t know who isn’t knowledgably down on that whole scene these days as being more & more the closed province of fewer & fewer, & breaking into it harder every day, from the packaging nightmare on the one hand to the super-budget/super profits approach on the other. Any cheerful doubts on these lines I might have had were certainly dispelled when I met & talked at some length with Larry McMurtry at Notre Dame. His prescription for a ‘property’ (in the fast disappearing low-budget class): ‘a small flat book with a strong narrative line’ as, for example,
The Last Picture Show
, though his luck in the industry since hasn’t been all that great either, considering numbers of works optioned, scripts written, films unproduced.

Anyhow it seems a toss between the stranglehold of ‘the industry’ that gives us
Earthquake
&
Superman
, or the director with his own charisma like Altman who seems, in this last number with Paul Newman surviving the frozen wastes of the future, to have pushed his personal hand too far. And while for instance I’d had high hopes for his interest in & carrying off
J R
as I envisioned it, I think now he’s not much interested in anything but what he envisions. He is I think an extreme but good example of handing any director a script telling him throughout the impressions the writer wants to create, & how to create them, rather than handing him hard characters in a ‘strong narrative line’ so that he can create the impressions as he envisions them & make it
his
movie: a further problem too I would think when this strong narrative line isn’t very clearly evident to him right from the beginning, something
happening
rather than time taken setting up the scene & characters which I think directors consider their prerogative. So given those conditions, if they are so, plus the state of The Industry itself today, it all may just end you up writing the thing for your own delectation like the 200page ‘play’ I wrote 15 years ago which is still on the shelf (& which I am now seriously considering trying to turn into a ‘small flat book with a strong narrative line’ & let show business discover it there. ha.)

In fact once through the accumulation of items during my absence is cleared up I have got to get down to something more serious than dutifully reading the morning’s
Times
; but your & the University’s generous support has given me something resembling a fresh start & many thanks for all of it.

best to Fanny Hurst & to Mimi & to Alina if she drops in & to you,

W– Gaddis

Earthquake
&
Superman
: big-budget films of 1974 and 1978, respectively.

Altman: Robert Altman (1925–2006), American film director. WG refers to his
Quintet
(1979).

Fanny Hurst: Fannie Hurst, the American novelist (1889–1968); the Hurst Professorship for visiting writers was funded from her bequest to Washington University, which she attended. (The other names are unidentified.)

To John Napper

Piermont

19 March 1979

Dear John.

Your letter here with its ‘mixed’ news when I returned from what I’ve got to call the parade circuit: 3 weeks at Washington Univ. in St Louis as ‘Visiting Hurst Professor’, then a briefer stint at Notre Dame all of it not only cheerfully corrupting to the ego but paid enough to get me to summer at least. Main burden of my ‘talks’ to students &c seems to have been warning them off of writing if they had glimmers of any other talent or even ability; & YOU can paint! But heaven knows John, I’m hardly one to talk (unless being highly paid) & the 40 thousand words you mention is no mere bagatelle. Lord knows there are certainly times (Trollope, Ouida &c notwithstanding) when one should give one’s art a rest—I haven’t disturbed mine for 2 or 3 years now & am only just considering a new assault—& turning from painting to embrace even so distant a relation as writing is certainly far better than turning from writing to embrace bottles & laughing girls. Or is it.

I’m only now getting through the items correspondence &c that accumulated while I was away, toward confronting the typewriter seriously again to discover whether an idea I’ve been nagging at is in fact a book that ‘wants’ (to use Saml Butler’s phrase) to be written, as it appears yours does: lovely torn-up feeling! Among my mail a note from Bard College cordially not asking me back for fall so at any moment here I’ll have decks & bank accounts cleared & have again to face the threat of new fictions, all that can save me from that the chance of Jack Gold’s extending a $-laden invitation to do a screenplay: after just about 1
year
of haggling I believe we have got the Agreement about settled (I having made every conceivable concession from sequels to T-shirts); but of course he may have felt me to be such an obstructionist during our haggling (or rather our lawyers’) that he’ll simply want to take the property & run & never hear my name again; in which case even if he does pick up the option & really make the movie there’s no real money until 1981. [...]

love to you both,

Willie

Ouida: like Trollope, the English novelist Ouida (pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, 1839– 1908) was very prolific.

confronting the typewriter: in a letter to the Nappers two months earlier, WG wrote: “I don’t especially want to write another book but I guess finally that’s what I do is write books so I’ve got to get things together toward that end” (18 January 1979).