B007RT1UH4 EBOK (115 page)

[...] with much love always,

Papa

Kirkus Reviews
: 15 May 1985, 437. See Green’s
Fire the Bastards!
for some choice words on its review of
R
in 1955.

Publisher’s Weekly
: Miriam Berkley interviewed Gaddis in Wainscott on 17 June, and her interview appeared in the 12 July issue of
PW
(56–57), accompanied by a photograph Berkley shot. (Another photo taken the same day appears on the cover of my monograph
William Gaddis
[Twayne, 1989].)

To Sarah E. Lauzen

[
A Chicago critic who had sent WG a draft of an entry that would be published the following year in
Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide
, ed. Larry McCaffery (Greenwood Press, 1986), 373–77.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

20 June 1985

Dear Ms Lauzen.

Thank you for sending me your nicely & wittily written entry. I especially appreciated (p.5) mention that my work is ‘enjoyable to read’: among the many ‘hostile and ignorant reviews’ of
The Recognitions
when it first appeared most were so cowed by what they called ‘erudition’ that scarcely anyone dared suggest that it might be comic.

To your entry:

p. 1 I’ve just broken silence & given an interview to
Publishers Weekly
, seemed the politic thing to do this time (& that place) should appear in a couple of weeks; & I might elsewhere if it’s a good elsewhere. (You might say for openers, something like Until the publication of his most recent novel WG had granted only one &c.)

bottom of page, should read grants from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1963; might also want to add Guggenheim Fellowship 1981

p.2 line 21, is there a better word for ‘counterfeiting’? (which people usually associate with $: try forgery?

p.4 line 3, for setting sun read evening sky? v. p. 474 [of
J R
], the point here’s really the moon coming up a few lines later, since (v.p. 661) what she’s really seen is the top of a Carvel stand (& is there a millionaire for that!). No need to elaborate, just for your information.

p.5 line 3, the NBA was 1976 (for books published in 1975).

line 8, I’d say in and around New York

Primary Sources: the Harvest pbk was Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Secondary Sources: I’d certainly include Frederick Karl,
American Fictions 1940–1980
, Harper & Row 1983; might want to mention Tony Tanner’s
City of Words
all of course at your discretion.

I especially enjoyed that ‘first and last attempt to reach the man at the airport’ wherever that came from.

thank you again

William Gaddis

Tanner’s
City of Words
: see 4 March 74.

‘first [...] airport’: it came from WG himself; in conversation WG had said of
CG
, “This is the closest I’ll ever come to writing for the man in the airport” (i.e., for the general reader looking for something entertaining to read). Lauzen called me in early 1985 to get information on the new novel (she hadn’t seen it yet), and I paraphrased his remark.

To Sarah Gaddis

Wainscott

6th July 1985

Dear Sarah.

Well here at last it is! & from reading it you will see that I couldn’t have been more fortunate (especially in light of the really dimwitted review by Lehmanhaupt a couple of days ago which may have been reprinted in the
Paris Tribune
?) —no, other reviews will come along now but no matter how good or bad nothing is as ‘influential’ as this front page of the
Times
. So we are off to a terrific start I think. (I sent you a ‘finished copy’ of the book more than a week ago, hope you got it?) Of course it is going to have to sell a good many copies to make back all the money I have had in advances before I get anything from it, [...]

Well I went up and did my stint at Bard & it was very strange, retracing those steps from 7 & 8 years ago when things were so difficult on all sides for us all. What is important, not just important but paramount, at the heart of it all, is how we’ve stood by each other & how both you & Matthew have stood by me Lord knows through some pretty dark times, even at the distances we’ve been apart, that has been & remains the by far best thing of my life (way beyond ‘rave reviews’) & now, with what certainly looks like Fortune Smiling, even Grinning (I touch wood) that we can build & build upon it. It has been a very great source of my strength, & of my driving myself down to work even in the times I really didn’t feel like it, simply couldn’t see the use of it, but—sentimental as it may sound—wanted above all for you & Matthew to be ‘proud’ of me as I’ve been of both of you increasingly so as time passes. I miss you so much now but when this long flurry passes & we get together one place or the other we can savour it all.

with much love always, always,

Papa

Lehmanhaupt: Lehmann-Haupt’s review appeared in the 3 July
New York Times
, p. C22.

front page of the
Times
: Cynthia Ozick’s review appeared on the front page of the 7 July
New York Times Book Review
.

To John W. Aldridge

[
The obverse of this postcard reproduces Texan artist Charles Anderson’s
Rapture
(1973), a kitschy fundamentalist painting depicting the return of the redeemer over Dallas’s Thornton Freeway. WG bought a stack of these postcards and used them for years.
]

[24 July 1985]

Dear Jack,

Glad and relieved to hear from you, it seems a very long time & we’d hoped you might pass through; glad also that the book did reach you & kept your generous regard for my work unblemished. (I’d wanted this
Rapture
for the book’s jacket, but the folks in Sherman Texas feared the book might have swear words in it & so declined.) Again, let us know if you
do
pass through.

our best to you both

Bill Gaddis

5.
A Frolic of His Own
, 1985–1994

To Johan Thielemans

[
In his book
Vrijheid in de steigers
(Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1985), Dutch critic Graa Boom-sma describes a visit with WG (p. 24, with Joseph Heller stopping by), and a few pages later describes how, sitting one evening out on Gaddis’s porch, Thomas Pynchon dropped by for a chat (p. 28).
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

11 October 1985

Dear Thielemans.

Thanks for your letter of the 30th September with its news—news to me—that Graa Boomsma not only visited us on Long Isld but that he met Thomas Pynchon here! He had written me of his trip to the US hoping we might meet, but there was some confusion & it never came about, surely not out here, most surely not Pynchon (whom I’ve never met, despite the many critical claims to similarity in our work: I see us both classed paranoid & conspiratorial but who, aside from James Michner, is not?). And so I would
very much
appreciate it when you’ve got the time if you might send me a copy of his piece with a translation. Most curious.

I met your charming Anna K. last week, she came up to the NY apartment on her tour of US writers & we had a delightful chat though I’m not at all sure that she got from it whatever information she was after. At any rate I enjoyed it highly.

Carpenter’s Gothic
seems to be going well here, & I have signed for it abroad with Andre Deutsch (Britain), Albin Michel (France), Rowolt (Ger.); Spain still unsigned but practically so (can’t think of the publisher, begins with an ‘A’). My agent is at the Frankfurt Book festival & I’ve told him to notify Sweden Holland Norway &c to watch your 27 October television which may help to bring them into the fold.

News here: we (Muriel & I) invited to 2 or 3 weeks in Russia, some sort of writers’ conference (though I have no details at all) from mid November, & I will try to stop in Paris on return around 5th December to see my daughter for a few days & what happens then is wide open.

Finally, word of some sort of British Publishers Assoc’n event for early next year selecting the 20 ‘best’ US novels since the war (WWII), a rather odd list but
The Recognitions
among them so that may be another grand tour; it all leaves little time for ‘writing’ even were I so inclined.

best regards,

W. Gaddis

Anna K.: by the time Thielemans made copies of these letters for me, he had forgotten who this woman was.

Carpenter’s Gothic
[...] abroad: the novel was published by Deutsch in 1986, as
Gothique charpentier
(translated by Marc Cholodenko) by Christian Bourgois in 1988 (not Albin Michel—see 6 February 1988 for an explanation), and as
Die Erlöser
(“The Savior,” trans. Klaus Modick and Martin Hielscher) by Rowohlt in 1988. The Spanish publisher Alfaguara brought out a translation of
R
in 1987 but not
CG
. The novel was also translated into Portuguese (1985), Swedish (1987), Italian (1990), and Polish (1991). A Spanish translation was eventually published by Sexto Piso in 2012.

Frankfurt Book festival: the annual trade show where publishers from around the world gather to sell foreign rights.

Russia: for an account of this trip, with occasional mention of WG, see William H. Gass’s “Some Snapshots from the Soviet Zone,”
Kenyon Review
8.4 (Fall 1986): 1–43, and, with the focus on WG,
A Temple of Texts
(Knopf, 2006), 191–200.

British Publishers Assoc’n: the British Book Marketing Council announced its list of the twenty greatest postwar American novels in October 1985 for a special trade promotion the following year called AUTHORS USA. All of the (living) authors were invited to attend, and WG was one of seven who accepted and went to England in February 1986. See
Publishers Weekly
, 18 October 1985, 20, for the complete list of novels, and its 28 February 1986 issue, 26, for details on the promotional tour.

To George Plimpton

[
American writer (1927–2003) and editor of the
Paris Review
who had often approached WG about an interview. The one mentioned below appeared in issue 105 (Winter 1987): 54–89.
]

235 East 73 Street

New York, New York 10021

4 January 1986

Dear George.

Regarding this ‘interview’ affliction: in this gap since discussing it for
Paris Review
back in the spring I got into a serious such encounter with a scholarly fellow extremely familiar with my work this past November in Budapest. He is Zoltan Abadi Nagy, & has got together some 45 pp (say 10,000 wds) which seem to me as good as could be done in this area for which you know I haven’t great enthusiasm & would like to get off once for all.

He plans its publication in Hungarian & is of course interested in possibilities for its publication here; thus this query whether it would serve
Paris Review
’s purposes since I would obviously be greatly relieved at this solution, or otherwise to find its US publication elsewhere & let the whole thing rest for another 10 years. [...]

We are here (988-1360) through February, then a month’s march through Australia before another damned spring & summer & hope even to see you, with love to Freddie,

& best regards,

Gaddis

Zoltan Abadi Nagy: properly, Zoltán Abádi-Nagy (1940– ), a translator and professor at Kossuth University in Debrecen, Hungary, also a visiting professor at several American universities over the years.

Freddie: Freddy Esty Plimpton, George Plimpton’s wife at the time (divorced in 1988).

To John and Pauline Napper

New York NY 10021

“Easter Sunday” [30 March] 1986

Dear John & dear Pauline,

why
it has taken me this long to get any sort of note off to you I don’t know, especially since so much recent time has gone to simply staring at blank pages, at walls, at ‘old notes’ for hope of some kindling spark for another novel, another book & even the why of that escapes me after the carousal we’ve had over the winter: a ‘writer’s conference’ in Russia last November (COLD) & then England in February for the ‘media’ some fragment of which might have reached you. Activities I’ve always avoided in my own country: 40seconds on BBC television, 55 on radio, interviews in the ‘print media’ . . . all of it set up by the Book Marketing Council there & seemed politic since both earlier books were being republished & the new one appearing at the same time, so there went the better part of a week on such activities every minute accounted for put up, meanwhile, in great comfort at a swank little hotel called the Marlborough Crest, heated towel racks & fresh fruit & a trouser presser, things like that near the British Museum; at any rate I called you a couple of times that week at the number I have, no answer but no liberty on my part even if I had reached you, & cold. Even the newspapers (which I found appalling! my old favourite
Daily Mail
? the
Express
?) headlining COLD. So on the Thursday where to of all places but East Anglia for a ‘conference’ which proved academia to be quite the same everywhere, & COLD. Having planned to go from there for a couple of days to Cambridge the results came down with a rousing cold for Muriel so we fled back to London where she recovered while I came down with the worst throat I can remember, 2 days there among the heated towel racks & home where I went to bed for a week, something I haven’t done since childhood & why I didn’t even try to reach you those last days when I’d dared to envision (before we came over) gamboling on the heaths (?) & moors (?) of Shropshire with you for a couple of days but we’d be lying at the bottom of your garden now if we’d tried it. You seemed near but very far away & it finally seemed kinder to all simply to beat it for home, why they scheduled such an event for that time of year, why 30° in London (let alone East A.) is like 10° here . . . but the BMC people & publishers were so attentive & generous & I hope if only for their sake that we sold some books.

Carpenter’s Gothic
has done quite well here for such a book despite numerous misreadings by our reviewers & critics even the favourable ones, mainly I think what it did for me was to bring me along as a real living novelist from having been viewed (when I was viewed) as a rather eccentric recluse who’d once written a couple of long very difficult books all which simply means that we get invited to Functions & patronize a few millionaires & otherwise the problems, the central problem of the work itself remains. I read so much of the current stuff & despair. A couple of nights ago met a lawyer (millionaire) who may be able to get me a cheap set of the
Corpus Juris Secundum
which is kind of a Reader’s Digest of the Law, every sort of case & human foible & precedent & plot one might imagine so there may be a spark somewhere there & enough reading to see me well through the Twilight Years (it is 100 volumes).

Well as you must know I have always admired what I’ve seen as your demand upon life to make itself worth pursuing & upon the work to make itself worth doing & however I may misread you this to me is the effort (
Carpenter’s Gothic
, as you may see, is unlike its predecessors which, in Samuel Butler’s phrase, ‘demanded to be written’, a
willed
book (fortunately the critics didn’t penetrate that though generations of PhD candidates to come may) so that is where we are now. Geographically though as the weather improves will get back out to Long Island, whisky still somewhat the problem but tobacco the abiding curse, that & late in life leisure? does one long for the panics of debt NO, No, no

love & best hopes & wishes,

Willie