B007RT1UH4 EBOK (134 page)

To Donald Oresman

Wainscott, New York 11975

18 Jan. ’93

Dear Donald,

first to thank you for ‘this year’s sheaf’ of literary pointers from which I happily gather you are well & fully operational; next to report that I turned in the last of the full (629pp) MS of this sometime law novel last week to the attention of Ann Patty at Poseidon whither I was diverted when the young Alan Peacock left the S&S fold. What she will make of it I do not know.

I recall, as I have continually throughout the process, your prompting that what was at stake here was a
novel
& not an agonizedly accurate legal treatise (Was
Arrowsmith
any the better for Lewis’s having checked every blister & catheter with the doctors? you asked) & so it has come about with
The Last Act
(a rather weak title I think & expect to change).

And so, as is hardly unusual, during the daily desperate course of it over the past 2 or 3 years, it changed of its own accord in that direction away from the series of legal briefs & opinions I had originally & haplessly envisioned, although the characters are from first to last entangled in legal thickets from the sublime to the ridiculous & the ‘story’ just as I planned it right through the last despairing outcry. (Was there a retort ascribed to Joyce when asked regarding
Ulysses
, What’s it about? ‘It’s not about something, it is something’?)

At any rate I am getting my breath for the patchwork yet to be done amidst bright spots on the publishing horizon: both
The Recognitions
&
J R
appearing in the Penguin XXth Century Classic series around May, & a trip before that to Paris for the publication of
J R
in the French language which I can scarcely imagine.

And so perilous as it may be I am finally able to try in some way to thank you for your concern & repeated patient & willing efforts at encouragement right from your first mailing of Palsgraf v LIRR through the now dogeared casebook on torts—still left now with the drained feeling of not having got in the prolonged brief on Episcopal Church of America v Pepsico (aka ‘Pepiscola’) though the case is there fleetingly, as with others, recalling Tolstoy’s dismayed outcry waking the day
War & Peace
went to press with My God! I left out the yacht race!

with very best regards and hopes of seeing you soon

Bill

To Ann Patty

[
Selections from the first two acts of WG’s old play
Once at Antietam
appear in
FHO
; he enclosed the third and final act.
]

235 East 73rd str.

New York 10021

24 February ”93

dear Ann Patty,

here (literally) is the last act. You will see, it is quite heavyhanded, inflated &c rising to heights almost, in fact, as bad as O’Neill. But it is perhaps what Oscar as we now know him from the book might have written (even to Oedipus’ blinding at the end). (There are references to items cut from the passages quoted in the book such as his daughter, the watch & tobacco case which may confuse.) However I am terribly pleased at your comment that you love reading the play whenever you come to it in the book & relieved that you don’t find it obtrusive since it should function, like the Opinions, as documentation; & like them, set in a different type, skimable or skipable for the LemonHaupts in the audience. I had omitted it both for the length & with some esoteric notion of ‘the melancholia of things completed’ as well as for its highblown pretensions but am curious what your impression will be.

From a quick review of your comments they all seem to me very well taken, helpful useful &c—with perhaps an exception or two when I come to them—very much to the point. Especially the Basie/Mudpye repetition of the O’Neill references which had in fact just struck me after finishing the thing looking back & thinking how did I let this happen? So I’d already faced the chore of somehow rectifying it. (I agree on somehow tying up the O’Neill estate suit at the end.)

I see your point regarding the length of the Deposition, had also already thought of trimming for instance Mudpye’s police/criminal symbiosis allegory; but every time I’ve been through the whole thing I’ve found it about the fastest reading in the book perhaps for its profound absurdity as legal procedures go (most depositions of this nature running 1 or 2 or more hundred pages); & again, in a different typeface, lightning skimable but to the heart of the pivotal issue for the ‘serious reader’ & the horde of disillusioned lawyers out there.

What do you think of this title for the book:
Once at Antietam
?

I am here drudging away & at your call on shortest notice, as yet unclear how long my patchwork will take & want your rough schedule whenever you have it.

Needless to say your concluding ‘brilliant, amazing, important novel’ is most heartening.

Yours,

W. Gaddis

‘the melancholia of things completed’: a line from Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil
(1886) that WG first used in
R
(69, 599) and again in
J R
(486).

To Muriel Oxenberg Murphy

[
One of several letters and faxes WG sent to Mrs. Murphy over the next few years as their relationship deteriorated. Two of hers to him are reprinted in her
Excerpts
, pp. 202–4.
]

Sunday evening [February/March 1993?]

Dear Muriel,

Maybe a way of putting it is that I think you have ‘star quality’ and I am trying to understand what I mean by that, but I think I have always thought that, the first time we met and when we met again and every day since but having got it into those two words I see what a marvelously complex idea it is and a difficult one—that I had simply accepted it when we came together counting my blessings every day and night and it is true you never leave my thoughts happy or proud troubled or fearful whatever they are or all of these at once and so as I say so difficult to try to face and figure out and satisfy except at last how terribly and sadly apparently true how I have not succeeded and, apparently again, till this last year or so taken for granted that I had—you must imagine it was quite painful to hear you write off the times we’ve had together here there and places in the world I’ve taken you as a mere decade alcoholic haze with “I’ve had better times” but what a dreadful thing it would be to lose it now. Well it’s surely enough raining out there and I am trying to get my work done and to figure out ‘star quality’* here for starters, perhaps you can?

With much love, at least I hope you know that,

W.

*not to be confused with ‘star complex’, ‘star struck’ &c—

To Muriel Oxenberg Murphy

[
A fax: the first half refers to two essays published in the February 1993 issue of
Dædalus
—which WG received as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters—and the second half details the sights he and Mrs. Murphy saw during their travels the previous decade.
]

3 March 93

The almost forgotten blessing of sleeping in a real bed again. . . . how subtly one’s horizons shrink, lower, close in, constrict & finally suffocate—& how the metaphor of the real open landscape can suddenly realise it, turn it wide & free to the lost illusion of all kinds of possibilities with the sun rising in an open sky spreading the day our before you freed from Miko Dwyer’s speculations on social scientific hypotheses & the brilliant insights of M Csikszentmihalyi’s observation that “Human beings appear to value two distinct sets of conditions. The first is pleasure, and it consists of genetically determined stimulation that the organism seeks out . . . The second condition that people seek out is enjoyment. Enjoyment differs from pleasure in that it is not a homeostatic process . . .”

good God, can one imagine a greater damper for sheer JOY?

I thought I heard Buddy Bolton shout

Open up these windows, let some of this foul air out . . .

I loved the one I discovered all this with here over the pond,

or on the Acropolis

or the Nevsky prospect

and the Kremlin gate

and the hotel courtyrad in the rue Jacob

overlooking Lake Como

or Butler’s pass to New Zealand’s South Island & Erewhon beyond

and the Tiber

and the Danube

and the Rhine, the Thames, the Seine

and the morning and the evening

cannot be dimissed as an alcoholic haze,

believe me.

Miko Dwyer’s speculations: the name sociologist Thomas J. Cottle gives to a 10-year-girl who speculates that adults must
give
children joy, which she hasn’t known since her grandmother died; see his “Witness of Joy,”
Dædalus
122.1 (Winter 1993): 135-36.

M Csikszentmihalyi’s observation: on p. 40 of the same issue of
Dædalus
. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934– ) is a Hungarian-American psychology professor best known for his book
Flow
:
The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(Harper & Row, 1990), where he offers similar observations.

I thought I’d heard [...] foul air out: a couplet from Jelly Roll Morton’s rendition of “Buddy Bolton’s Blues,” composed by African-American jazz cornetist Charles Bolden (1877–1931).

Butler’s pass to [...] Erewhon: Butler’s
Erewhon
is set in New Zealand.

To Donald Oresman

Wainscott, NY

20 April 1993

Dear Donald,

‘No good deed goes unpunished’ as they say, hence in gratitude for your last researches here in the spirit of Sarah Bernhardt’s positively last farewell appearance.

Does LEXIS® NEXIS® go so far back as 1834 to provide the context for Baron Parke’s classic phrase ‘going on a frolic of his own’ as cited by Prosser in Joel v. Morrison, 1834, 6 C. & P. 501, 172 Eng.Rep 1338[?]

I’m glad you find
A Frolic of His Own
‘by far the best’ [of proposed titles] & am quite settled on it. The above information is hardly vital since the phrase is explained loosely far into the text dialogue & might even be used as an epigraph if easily available the fuller context might provide even further entertainment, if not we shall certainly survive (carrying the notion further as one is inclined to do waking at 3 am, ‘going on a frolic of his own’ is in a world governed by laws really what the artist is eventually all about.