B007RT1UH4 EBOK (101 page)

To John R. Kuehl

[
Kuehl wrote to WG about his plan for a collection of essays on his work, to be edited by Kuehl and myself—Kuehl originated the idea, then invited me to coedit the work after he learned of my forthcoming book on
R
—and asked if it would be possible to include an interview as part of the book. The collection was published in 1984 as
In Recognition of William Gaddis
(Syracuse University Press), but without an interview.
]

Wainscott NY 11975

[9 November 1981]

Dear John Kuehl.

I’ve just had a note from someone in Canada opening thus:

Hello Mr Gaddis. I arrived home Saturday with a stirring book by Alfred Kazin:
Bright Book of Life, American Novelists
&c. And I find you are not even mentioned. I extend my warmest congratulations . . .

So of course you are aware that there are many enough out there who do not share your (& Steven Moore’s) most generous opinion of my ‘body of work’ (though here for one I have never understood how Kazin’s relentlessly self serving pomposities have kept him afloat as a ‘prominent critic’).

At any rate of course I am intrigued by the notion of Moore’s extraordinary effort and your projected one together, my feelings mixed as always (‘shameful neglect’, yes: my last royalty statement from Harcourt was something like $11.48; while another part of me cringes at ‘most important single body of post WWII fiction’ . . .) Which is why I suppose I’m still reluctant about interviews, had recently in fact an aborted attempt from a most well meaning fellow [Tom LeClair] from Cincinnati (sp?) which I felt turned out rambling and poor & of course ended in pain & recriminations &c. As though somehow perhaps my acceding to your request would make it appear that I’d promoted the whole thing (there were those in fact back in those days who told it around that Jack Green’s marvels, including a full page ad in the then new
Village Voice
which he executed and paid for, were my doing under that pseudonym). But it would clearly be mean spirited for me to refuse in the face of your & others’ generous efforts. From fragments of past experience though I feel it would be more satisfactory all round if you sent me some questions and I laboured out answers, not for mistrust of your approaches but of my own; & that it all come out fairly brief?

I’m fairly unaware & generally startled (shameful neglect notwithstanding) when I hear of activities going on concerning my work, witness your letter. But some items come to mind which may be of interest or use to you.

Did you come across a book called
Money Talks
(Univ Oklahoma Press 1980, ed. Roy Male) with a piece on
J R
by a Steven Weisenburger? I wrote him a note of thanks & he in return says he is writing a piece on both novels for an editor named John O’Brien who is putting together a special issue of
Review of Contemporary Fiction
on my work for 1982. All news to me. (If you want to reach Weisenburger he is at 271 E. Maxwell, #4; Lexington Kentucky 40506)

Then there is a Jay Fellows whom you may know or know of, at Columbia I think, said he was going to do something on my work possibly a book, he’s a rather intense & self directed fellow & I don’t know how he’d regard an inquiry if you were so inclined & don’t have his address out here but his phone is 749-0208. He has a ladyfriend name I recall as Ann Douglas who I think teaches some of my work up there.

Finally for your entertainment I enclose a page of a letter from a man in Poland’s (state run I assume) publishing scene, I’ve apparently a diligent following in Warsaw & did give him an interview of sorts provided it not appear here.

I am out here probably through November & mail to here or the NY address you have gets to me sooner or later.

With best regards

William Gaddis

Bright Book of Life
: a study of American fiction from Hemingway to Mailer, published in 1973.

Review of Contemporary Fiction
: the issue appeared in the summer of 1982; Weisenburger’s “Paper Currencies: Reading William Gaddis” appears on pp. 12–22 and was reprinted in
In Recognition of William Gaddis
, 147–61.

Jay Fellows: author of two books on John Ruskin; he was invited to contribute to the book but did not submit any work.

Ann Douglas: a professor of American Literature at Columbia, author of many books and essays on post-World War II American culture.

page of a letter: the page from Mirkowicz was not included when Kuehl made copies of his letters from WG for me.

To John Large

Wainscott NY 11975

21 November 1981

Dear John Large.

Most apologetic about this long delay responding to yours of 22 October; first because I’m out here on the tail end of Long Isld & mail forwarding from the NY address is sporadic, next because I glanced at your letter & put it aside to read & answer eventually without noting your request regarding a reference to Princeton, so I hope it is not too late for me to say of course, if you’ll let me know where & to whom there ($19G is a rather hefty bundle!)

And thanks for sending along your magazine. Your first excerpt a bit gamey for me (as I suppose the 2nd too): though I do of course remember the 2nd when you were labouring at its earlier version which I recall as a good deal more strained, & this—while the ‘subject matter’ cheers me up no more than it did then—I find far far improved & evidence that your sweating out those early writer’s agonies, frustrations & paralyses have given you more than any amount of ‘teaching’, ease & authority & simply moving people around.

I am not that much further into but working on another & rather more bland, or as the reviewers’ word has it, ‘accessible’ novel, God knows. I cannot recommend the profession unless one does start out ending up with it as the only game in town.

During December (down our throats) we should be more often in New York & might see you there if you pass through, meanwhile for the moment the address below, glad to know you’re in one piece & pass along a greeting to K Begos from me,

all best wishes

William Gaddis

your magazine:
Dyslexia
, coedited by Large and Kevin Begos.

To Steven Moore

[
This and many of the letters that follow have to do with assembling
In Recognition of William Gaddis
. I wanted to reprint Jack Green’s
Fire the Bastards!
there and asked Gaddis how to locate him.
]

Wainscott NY 11975

1 December 1981

Dear Steven Moore.

Regarding Jack Green: I saw him last only a year or so ago & the last address I have for him is: PO Box 3, Cooper Station, New York NY 10003, otherwise no idea how you might find him, he did have an address on Bowery but I don’t find it listed. But I hope you may find him & won’t go further now (& of course I vastly appreciated his efforts on the book’s behalf) than to say he was a very pre-hippie, made his living then & may largely still as a ruthlessly efficient proof reader (free lance). In that regard it might interest you to know that he & I did meet somewhere back then, very early 60s? since he’d turned up a number of errors, mainly minor & typos, in the original edition of
The Recognitions
. I had these from him when the Meridian edition was being done around 1962–3, and the editor of that series stripped in the changes generously enough (he is Aaron Asher, now ed. in chief at Farrar Strauss & Giroux (Robt Giroux incidentally was nominal editor of the book at Harcourt Brace, left very soon after when Jovanovitch took the place over; so the book was originally published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., not “& World”, let alone “& Jovanovitch”).

At any rate, Meridian sold printed sheets to a British publisher McGibbon & Key, so only these editions stand corrected since, when Harcourt brought out a further printing & its own ugly paperback, they used old plates or more likely offset their original ed. without, of course, notifying me. (In terms of typos &c the Avon ed. is not even to be discussed; though I suppose I should be glad it’s still in print in any form even that.)

Jack Green had started an exhaustive card catalogue crossfile reference on
The Recognitions
with an eye, as I recall, to compiling a “Skeleton Key to &c”, heaven knows what became of it.

A quite meticulous translation was done into French by Jean Lambert (was then at Smith College, an ex-Gide son in law!); one rather less so I suspect into Italian (Mondadori) though it got reviewed by, (can’t remember his name, very embarrassing, wrote
The Romantic Agony
), pleased me greatly of course. The Germans (Rowolt) ran through 2 or 3 translators, finally said they had the man who’d translated
Moby Dick
into German and a fresh start, that was some 15 years ago, never heard from them again.

best regards

William Gaddis

PS Weren’t there more than #12–14 of
newspaper
’s Fire the Bastards? I’ve got them somewhere, unsure where, Green might too. I will look meanwhile. Coincidence if such it is with Univ. Nebraska (Press), I heard some 20 years ago that the poet Karl Shapiro was going to devote an issue of
Prairie Schooner
which he then edited to
The Recognitions
, he abruptly left the editorship or the University or both & that ended that.

Robt Giroux: distinguished American editor (1914–2008), at Harcourt, Brace from 1940 to 1955, thereafter at FSG (as it’s known in the trade). “I had a hell of a time getting it through the Harcourt hierarchy,” he later recalled, “but Donald Brace okayed it” (quoted in Ted Morgan’s “Feeding the Stream,”
Saturday Review
, 1 September 1979, 43). Giroux included WG on a list of the ten authors whose first books he was proudest to have discovered and published (see Donald Hall’s “Robert Giroux: Looking for Masterpieces,”
New York Times Book Review
, 6 January 1980, 3, 22–24).

ugly paperback: Harcourt, Brace & World reprinted
R
in cloth in May 1964 and brought out a trade paperback edition (under the Harvest imprint) in 1970.

Skeleton Key: Green’s work—modeled, WG is suggesting, on Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s
A Skeleton Key to “Finnegans Wake”
(1944)—was abandoned in 1980. wrote
The Romantic Agony
: the distinguished Italian critic Mario Praz (1896–1982).