B007RT1UH4 EBOK (139 page)

To Paul Ingendaay

New York, New York 10021

13 February 1994

Dear Paul Ingendaay,

your
Romane von W* G*
is indeed a handsome piece of work & thank you for sending it to me. We seem to have been exchanging letters for rather a while & I’ve almost the feeling that you may have spent as much time & energy disentangling my work as I’ve put in creating the tangles, those of this last book at any rate which has got off to a far better start critically & in sales than its predecessors in large part I think for having been labled more ‘accessible’ & even, reviewers finally admit, highly comic.

Your pointing out the arboreal carnage interwoven in
J R
of course rears again in the new book with its concluding screaming parody of
The Cherry Orchard
occasioned, in fact by precisely such a horror at the far (but scarcely far enough) end of our driveway at the heretofore tranquil place on Long Island day after day saws trucks bulldozers for the last 2 years I worked on the book there, no underestimating the destructive power of money in the wrong hands (where it usually is) & the powerlessness of ‘art’ in collision, hardly news but always news to me.

I’m needless to say more than curious looking forward to see what emerges from Rowohlt’s efforts with those legal opinions rendered into German! & I’m further sure that your efforts on my work’s behalf must have encouraged Naumann’s taking on this new assignment, for which I remain most grateful to you.

with my best regards again,

—Gaddis

The Cherry Orchard
: Anton Chekhov’s final play (1904).

Rowohlt’s [...] Naumann’s: Michael Naumann of the German publishers Rowolht acquired rights to
FHO
, publishing it in Nikolaus Stingl’s translation as
Letzte Instanz
in the fall of 1996.

To Michael Millman

[
The editor at Penguin responsible for the 1993 Penguin Classics reissues of
R
and
J R
. Penguin would add
CG
to their classics line in March 1999.
]

Wainscott

2 March 94

Dear Michael Millman—

Candida has forwarded to me your letter regarding the new book & the shortfall on the 2 old ones—“puzzled” at how few copies of those have been ordered by bookstores recently—but why “puzzled”? When ½ the country thinks they’re still out of print and—as you observe yourself—need
ads
to
remind them
of the new epiphanies. Along these lines I enclose my letter to “my editor” at S&S (not yet acknowledged)—

What seems such a damned shame in both cases is the marvelously successful effort that went into making the books themselves—yours with the 2 ‘classics’, covers (which should have so splendidly framed even a small ad) &c, & the designers compositors copyreaders &c at S&S producing such a marvelous ‘product’ & after that everyone collapsing (you may have seen the off register “colour” ½ page in the
Times BR
—I ask you!).

best regards,

W. Gaddis

To Gregory Comnes

[
Comes had written to ask (1) if WG would autograph his copy of
FHO
, and (2) if WG had received his
Ethics of Indeterminacy
. This note is undated and lacks a salutation.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

[March 1994]

NEW (for me) WORD: APORIA (from a Gertrude Himmelfarb rvw)

“difference, discontinuity, disparity, contradiction, discord, ambiguity, irony, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy, chaos”

LONG LIVE!

1) Surely, send the book for signing

2) I have your (signed) book & thank you

3) I have your note with it & don’t know what you mean with “all & sundry are busy complimenting me on the caustic comment made about my book” This is Jonathan Raban?

Ah!

Gaddis

Himmelfarb rvw: the word and definition are from Michiko Kakutani’s review of historian Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book
On Looking into the Abyss
in the
New York Times
, 1 March 1994, C19.

Raban: in the opening paragraph of his review of
FHO
in the
New York Review
, Raban refers to “the professional Gaddisites, a solemn crew themselves given to sentences like ‘Read from this perspective,
The Recognitions
demonstrates the essential alterity of the world, the meta-ethical virtue of agapistic ethics’” (from p. 49 of Comnes’s book).

To John Updike

[
American novelist and critic (1932–2009) who, like WG, attended Harvard (class of ’54) and wrote for the
Lampoon
.
]

Wainscott, New York 11975

13 March 1994

dear Reverend John,

how is it that we who have so desperately sought to rescue/impose order seem in the summing up to have led the most disorderly of lives? Your letters (now & a couple of years ago) breathe a kind of self contentment—longlasting wife, real estate, retirement work—which I gave up on long ago & which may point to our essentially opposite orientations: yours grounded on absolutes (as you’ve demanded from the start) vs. my attempt to “provide an honest vision of an essentially indeterminate landscape a postmodern world without absolutes” &c (v. Comnes,
The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of W*G*
, Univ. Florida Press 1994) for which I learn a new word “aporia” from a review of a theoretical opponent named Himmelfarb (sic) meaning “discontinuity, disparity, contradiction, discord, ambiguity, chaos” (she’s against it). Of course you have borne a tragedy which may only have confirmed your stance (like the patriotic parents who lost sons in Vietnam) either of which I am sure would have destroyed me confirming
my
stance. Think not the struggle naught availeth &c . . . Or is another word for it ‘romantic’ re your account of Mowery of whom I lost track long ago, or Bill Davison, d[itt]o. Dear old Barney Emmart, diabetic & other illnesses but I think finally a spirit severely damaged following a very bad mugging in Spain, a man of such wit & tenderness & a great loss dead as he was while still alive. Jacob Bean too who of course started off in the Divinity School &, in a manner of speaking, returned to it toward the end in an alcoholic haze of devout P.E. devotions as blindness overtook him, a gentleman in the most generous sense of the word. Thus regarding ‘our 50th’ D.V. but I doubt that I am, since I feel so strongly that it is not the college I went to but from their relentless mailings (inc.
H* Magazine
) has become a vast selfpromoting multinational corporation with [
gap in manuscript
] & no place whatsoever for me.

Like yourself I have had the body’s plumbing & electrical functions refurbished & am now casting about through the vast store of detritus those 4 books have left behind to see whether there lurks somewhere another ‘wanting to be written’ (as Samuel Butler had it), nearer I fear to Flaubert than I ever knew.

[unsigned fax]

you have borne a tragedy: perhaps a reference to the death of Updike’s mother in 1989.

Think not the struggle: the opening line of Arthur Hugh Clough’s once-popular poem of encouragement, “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” (1855;
ODQ
).

Mowery: unidentified.

Bill Davison: the man WG drove to Mexico with in 1947.

P.E.: elsewhere WG uses this abbreviation for Protestant Ethic.