B007RT1UH4 EBOK (116 page)

Corpus Juris Secundum
: WG received not this but the 81-volume
American Jurisprudence
, 2nd edition (1975), which provided the spark for what would become
FHO
. The millionaire lawyer was Donald Oresman (see next letter).

To Donald Oresman

[
A New York attorney, art collector, and bibliophile (1926– ), at the time Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Paramount Communications. Over the next seven years WG sought legal advice from him for
FHO
.
]

New York NY 10021

17 April 1986

Dear Donald,

I have read the Cardozo and dissenting opinions you sent to me over and over again, and immensely appreciate your trouble selecting these glimpses for me. How few pages they are for what they contain: the vistas of reason, language and rigorous speculation flung open by an otherwise inconsequential woman on a train platform buying a ticket for a completely inconsequential place. The man pursuing his cousin’s hat on the railway bridge is fine too, and again the language! (‘The risk of rescue, if only it be not wanton, is born of the occasion. The emergency begets the man.’ &c.) Much of my fascination clearly lies in the material itself, since the defining (and rampant evasion) of accountability seems to me central to our times.

Your efforts regarding
Corpus Juris Secundum
are also very greatly appreciated, and I would only urge ‘restraint’ (in the nonjudicial sense). Despite my grand declarations of that evening, I clearly will not survive the entire set, hardly need a recent edition and certainly not with the updating addenda, and any odd volumes you might come up with without further serious effort would be a pleasure. In fact, since I seem to have far more interst in civil than in criminal law, and in such areas as Liability, Risk, Negligence (though here is of course criminal negligence) and ‘the unswerving punctuality of chance’, I might be best suited to simply sit down and read your casebook on Torts from which you lifted these pages, for these wider evidences of what James called ‘the high brutality of good intentions’.

However all this comes out, you have again my warm thanks.

With very best regards,

Bill

Cardozo: Benjamin Cardozo’s opinion
Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad
(1928) is considered a legal classic, and is referred to twice in
FHO
(29, 579).

casebook on Torts: William L. Prosser et al.’s
Cases and Materials on Torts
, 7th ed. (Foundation Press, 1982), a classic text originally published in 1943, and the source for many of the legal citations in
FHO
.

‘the high brutality of good intentions’: title of an essay on Henry James by William H. Gass (1958; rpt. in
Fiction and the Figures of Life
, Knopf, 1970), and a phrase WG will continue to use occasionally.

To Clive Suter

[
A student at Keele University in England who had sent WG his Master’s thesis, “God Damned Holy Shit: Wasteful Reproduction in William Gaddis’
J R
” (1985).
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

27 April 1986

Dear Clive Suter.

Thank you for your letter & the accompanying thesis. I do remember our meeting and your speaking of it what seems like a very long (& cold) time ago, & from reviews that have been sent me I gather that
Carpenter’s Gothic
has been quite well received which of course is pleasing.

I’ve given your thesis 2 readings with obvious enjoyment: it is a thesis
with
a thesis (which unhappily is not always the case, some of them I’ve seen mere laborious retelling of the ‘plot’). But in others such as this one I am always intrigued by what I learn, as for example the Marc Shell quote p. 3, marvelous. Your examination of Gibbs is I think awfully good &, again, rare (he is after all central to the book).

However not to pursue it point by point, the extremely well knit details & citations of your argument have absorbed me in this fascinating way: with the rise, or at least the rise in cohesion of the political right in America, my work has more frequently been characaterised as an assault on capitalism, with the unspoken implication of communism as its only alternative. What it comes down to, as some woman in a recent piece in
Commentary
touched upon, is whether in each system the abuses are inherent, or whether one or the other system is amenable to its abuses being corrected & therefore essentially sound. For communism, or rather the nearest approach to it on a visit to Soviet Russia last fall, I think the abuses are inherent and those of the totalitarianism it spawns inevitable; & I had thought that I thought, & that my work was directed at the abuses—& thus the (naive) hope of their correction—in our own system as essentially sound. However through reading your thesis here and now in the light, or perhaps the darkness, of ‘free enterprise’ totally unleashed by our present Administration, deficit ridden, corporate takeovers in the hundred millions which serve no productive purpose whatever, the widening gap between ‘private wealth & public squalor’ everywhere apparent (to say nothing of our Pentagon, NASA &c monsters), I have got to wonder, & that line ‘he builded better than he knew’ comes to mind, at least to keep the mind working for which I thank you. There’s a line somewhere in
The Recognitions
about the present constantly reshaping the past & this may be it.

with best regards,

William Gaddis

Marc Shell quote: “America was the historical birthplace of widespread paper money in the Western world, and a debate about coined and paper money dominated American political discourse from 1825 to 1845. [...] The paper money debate was concerned with symbolization in general, and hence not only money but also with aesthetics. [...] With the advent of paper money certain analogies, such as the one that ‘paper is to gold as word is to meaning,’ came to exemplify and to inform logically the discourse about language. For example a call was made by critics for a return to gold not only in money but also in aesthetics and language. [...] While a coin may be both symbol (as inscription or type) and commodity (as metallic ingot), paper is only (or virtually all) symbolic. Thus Wittgenstein chooses to compare meaningless sounds with scraps of paper rather than with unminted ingots” (
Money, Language and Thought
[Univ. of California Press, 1982], pp. 5–6, 18–19; Suter’s ellipses).

some woman in [...]
Commentary
: Midge Decter in the November 1985 issue, pp. 34–36. ‘he builded better than he knew’: see note to 13 June 1984.

present constantly reshaping the past: see note to Sheri Martinelli letter (Summer 1953?).

Top: Mario Vargas Llosa, William H. Gass, and WG at the PEN-sponsored 48th Worldwide Writers’ Congress, New York City, January 1986.

Bottom: WG (and Muriel Murphy behind him) and Steven Moore at the publication party for Joseph McElroy’s
Women and Men
, New York City, May 1987. (Both photographs © Miriam Berkley.)

To Steven Moore

[
Two acquaintances of mine from New Hampshire, Clifford Mead and Richard Scaramelli, planned to visit me in New Jersey and wondered if I could arrange for the three of us to visit WG. In the postscript to my letter asking if a visit was feasible, I had asked, “Who in the world is Peter Taylor and what’s he doing with your PEN/Faulkner award?”—for much to my (and many others’) surprise,
CG
, though nominated, was passed over in favor of Taylor’s latest book,
The Old Forest and Other Stories
.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

25 May ’86

Dear Steve Moore.

The PEN/Faulkner award & ceremonies turned out to be, in my jaundiced northern eyes, something resembling the Southern Christian Readership Conference: 1 judge Texan; 1 Virginian; & Alice Adams fighting the good fight. Peter Taylor, whose work I didn’t know, all short stories apparently, a gentle elderly gent from Charlottesville &c. Made quite clear to us by m.c. Mississippian Hodding Carter that its whole thrust was to put Washington (a real southern town as I often forget till I revisit) on the culture map, shake off the yankee (NY) yoke. Uh huh.

To your real query: I am here with only occasional forays to NY & unpredictable at that. You’d all 3 be welcome to come out for lunch though it is a hell of a distance, if you call first (516-537-0743) we should be able to work something out here or possibly NY though I’ve no immediate plans for going into town.

yours,

W. Gaddis