B007RT1UH4 EBOK (141 page)

The road ahead (ahead?) here is off like the course of, who was it? mounting his horse & ‘riding off in all directions’, tempting the novelist to descend to yet untold depths (‘The writer will always sell you out’ says Joan Didion) though I hasten to add you both must come off quite unscathed in the event, if event there is to be frankly at the moment I’ve scarcely the appetite for it though the possibility nay perhaps the necessity of grovelling for another advance suggests itself so me & mine are not to be seen in the Edgeware Road singing ‘Back and side go bare, go bare, but belly God give thee good ale . . .’

with love and thanks again

as these things become more precious,

Willie

Psychopathology of Everyday Life: title of one of Freud’s best-known books (1901). as archie told mehitabel: “archy” the free-verse-typing cockroach and his alley-cat friend from Don Marquis’s popular newspaper columns of the 1910s and 1920s.

‘riding off in all directions’: a famous line from one of Canadian author Stephen Leacock’s
Nonsense Novels
(1911): “Lord Ronald [...] flung himself upon his horse and road madly off in all directions” (
ODQ
). ‘The writer [...] says Joan Didion: correctly, “
writers are always selling somebody out
,” the concluding sentence of her preface to
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1968).

‘Back and side [...] good ale’: from a song in William Stevenson’s Elizabethan comedy
Gammer
Gurton’s Needle
: “Back and side go bare, go bare / [...] / But belly God send thee good ale enough” (
ODQ
).

To Stanley Elkin

[
Elkin’s 1985 novel
The Magic Kingdom
features a character named Charles Mudd-Gaddis, an eight-year-old geriatric who “dreams of his first birthday. He dreams the cake and dreams the candles, dreams the balloons and dreams the streamers; he dreams the toys, he dreams the clapping. And dreams he’s three, the little boy, who would have been a man by now—twenty, twenty-one. Then dreams the girl, six, to him a woman. And now he’s five and pushing forty. Ah, to be thirty-four again! he dreams. And dreams he’s seven and confusion comes, that white aphasia of the heart and head. And dreams in awful clarity it’s now, and can’t recall how old he really is” (Dutton, 1985, 80).
]

9 November ’94

dear Stanley,

I had been vaguely troubled by Mudd-Gaddis since first stumbling upon him & seeing you again in such fine fettle thought to get back & give him a closer look. And was stunned. How do you do it? How (p. 80) did you
know
! Staggers. Though perhaps 10 years ago it mightn’t have fit so well, but prescient my God it’s I, it’s me today that brief touching elegant agonizing profile believe me real age 72 is daily more infringed by that blond pageboy off to boarding school age 5 & the confusion
does
come, “that white aphasia of the heart and head” sheer poetry, break those 10 lines up into 20 & what a poem it is (looking about today at what passes for ‘poetry’) in its ‘awful clarity’ for a stupefying epitaph however you may have meant it (in deconstruction’s disavowing the author’s intent) I have taken it to heart.

good weather & warmest wishes to you both

Gaddis

To Judith Gaddis

[
Typed on the back of a Harvard newsletter regarding WG’s 50th class reunion.
]

Wainscott

15 Jan. ’95

Dear Judith,

response of sorts to your long delightful multitypeface (this is still the toy Olivetti I gave Sarah off to George School) letter & handsome letterhead (see other side) of, dare I say it? last September . . . but frankly it seems much longer ago than that, upheavals on every front: outrage at the publisher’s failure to advertise, then the Book Award (sound paintfully familiar? but not entirely broke this time); health coming & going, travel slowed by those decades of tobacco but no whisky now for some 5 years (a little wine with dinner); the last couple of months a kind of running horror of being asked to give ‘readings’ & getting up to give a presentation on why I don’t give readings & don’t think anyone else should, why did we invent the printed page? the whole vain nonsense of ‘writers in performance’, everything is performance; & ‘book signings’ . . . none of it to do with the work itself, please! [...]

And now when it would seem that one could finally sit down & gape at the Golden Years the success of this last book makes a profitable opportunity for the next one which I suppose must be taken advantage of though I’ve no idea what it would be ‘about’ but as J R said at some point —Even when you win you have to keep playing [p. 647]. [...]

and so good to hear you sounding well & in such good spirits

W.

To Sarah Gaddis

[
Typed on the back of a photocopy of an article on WG in the French newspaper
Le Monde
.
]

Wainscott

7 Feb. 95

Dear Sarah,

well! Which would we prefer,
Le Monde
or the ‘Pulitzer Prize’ —I’ll settle for the French, after what Oscar had to say about the Pulitzer on page 369 and these people picked up and attributed to
me
! Well, so long Pulitzer (I think they hand them out in April)(in case anyone got as far as p. 369 which I’d doubt, Oscar is right). Lord knows what this Book Critics Award thing is, I think no $$ just the ‘prestige’ (who needs it) . . .

At least, after hearing you on the phone last night, I can reread your letter & feel that
at least
you can take a good deal of satisfaction in your work & how well you have done it & that there are some serious people around who are aware of it & appreciate it but believe me recalling those 5 Pfizer years, & now seeing your ‘boss’ (from outside thank God) so perfectly cloned in this cheery dense utterly self-centered ‘cute’ bird-brain at S&S I feel for you, how consistently these ridiculous people get themselves into positions of power is one of the great sad commentaries on our times but all this is cold comfort I know + the fact that they can turn quite vicious if ‘crossed’ . . . the only revenge probably a short novel about such a scene but of course that’s been done too (though there’s always room for one more if well done: take notes! (right down to the lipstick smear on her teeth as I did with Miss Flesch in
J R
who was ‘inspired’ by this ghastly woman at Pfizer) . . .)

Meanwhile I’m simply fiddling around trying to dredge up some idea for a project both to keep my mind in 1 piece & to embark on a regular income from S&S or Knopf &c, & very sadly meanwhile here again Candida in difficulty in hospital with a leg/foot operation, some rare circulatory problem that will leave her impaired & a long and painful haul & I am trying to convice her to sell her agency & retire &c, count our blessings as they say but at what cost!

much love again,

Papa

Pulitzer on page 369: “—The Pu, good Good talk about being famous for five minutes the Pulitzer Prize is a gimcrack out of journalism school you wrap the fish in tomorrow, talk about the great unwashed it’s got nothing to do with literature or great drama it’s the hallmark of mediocrity and you’ll never live it down [...].” WG’s low opinion of the Pulitzers is also expressed in his letter of 1 May 1990 and in
AA
(60–62).

Book Critics Award: the National Book Critics Circle gives out awards every spring.
FHO
was a finalist for the 1994 fiction award but lost to Carol Shield’s
Stone Diaries
.

Miss Flesch in
J R
: a “curriculum specialist” at J R’s school, later hired as “project director” (and Thomas Eigen’s boss) at Typhon International (=Pfizer). Miss Flesch’s lipstick-smeared teeth are noted at her first appearance in the novel (22).

To Muriel Oxenberg Murphy

[
A fax without salutation entitled “In the Style of Thomas Bernhard.” WG describes the end of their relationship in the manner of the Austrian writer’s 1970 novel
The Lime Works
, in which a narrator tells the disjointed story of an eccentric writer named Konrad who has just killed his wife, drawing on hearsay by characters like Konrad’s acquaintance Fro. The opening paragraph is from pages 128–29 of Sophie Wilkins’s translation (Knopf, 1973); WG photocopied the same passage and sent it to Greg Comnes in 1996 with a note saying “You may see where I have found my Cicero for all future engagements.” WG’s final novel
AA
is very much “in the style of Thomas Bernard.”
]