B007RT1UH4 EBOK (54 page)

To Edith Gaddis

[Montgomery, NY]

11 december 1952

dear Mother,

Rain, rain, —and temperatures like September, all very well except that the furnace of course feels slighted, not needed, senses I’m only coddling her for chills ahead, and is slowly pining away down there, the mere blush of life on her black cheek. She gets worse daily:(I think it must be the outside air’s so warm that an updraft’s wanting, and with the first chill of terror that descends on us she’ll rouse).

The work is going well, though the days are becoming confused with nights, to the point where I’ve been working until 5 and 6, and not getting up until mid-morning: but there, what’s the sense in being groggy and unworkmanlike at 9am, and asleep at 3? if time is, as it is here, a continuum . . . well, this goes on . . .

A glorious feat, fête, what have you, last night, I heard Handel’s Messiah, there is something to make us weep in exaltation. (Of course it came from Toronto, in entirety, not a Firestone rag-end, presenting a single chorus, And He shall feed His flock as though He were Harvey Firestone Handel’s patron . . . followed by O Little Town of ——as part of the Oratorio, —this goes on and on too as you know.) Nothing, you know, to do with Christmas as agreed but I think that after the holidays when prices and treatment in our great salons are more gentle I shall look around down there for some music-playing apparatus.

No; for Christmas I’ll greatly appreciate it if you can bring up a box of this paper. It is Southworth Paper 4-star plain 8½ by 13 number 402 D. 500 sheets is around 4$. I got this in the stationer across from the Harvard club, where I’ve been getting it for some time and don’t know another place. And another ribbon please? [...]

love,

W.

Harvey Firestone: American industrialist (1868–1938); his tire company sponsored
The Voice of
Firestone
, a weekly radio program featuring classical music (1928–56).

To Edith Gaddis

[Montgomery, NY]

19 february 1953

dear Mother,

Did you get the McCarthy-trial programme? It is going on now, a few minutes after our call: God, that dead bullying voice of the senator from Wisconsin, and the way things can be twisted. This
Voice of America
business, do you wonder that our propaganda is lousy, and from now on, after this business, is going to be just plain pitiful. O, it breaks my heart, because this whole war is propaganda and what, what, what can you do.

Of course (as Elmer Davis mentioned) what can be better for, say, anti-Communist propaganda than using, but I mean using carefully and intelligently, not scattering broadcast, the work of known Communists, when it can be used to support our side? As taking things out of their original context (as, as far as this goes, and, as far as, like an idiot, I told the State Dept ‘Special Investigator’ cops could quite easily be done with my work to support their side (I mean this work I’m now on, the Dale Carnegie business for instance; not what I wrote for the State last winter)) is a common and an obviously effective ‘trick’, and that’s what propaganda is, you know. I mean falsifying to the extent of not telling the whole story (the way women lie). What advertising is, and that’s what’s risible at this point, that we’re being eaten out from the inside by advertising like no other nation in history (“selling”) and from the outside by this bullying voice on the radio now.

Good God, maybe Martin Dworkin’s a top-Communist, maybe Bill Haygood is, (this I suppose should be burned, you know how I mean it but those lines ‘out of context’: —Now Mr Gaddis, you do respect your Mother?/ Yes sir./ And I would assume that you usually tell her the truth about things which concern you and your affairs?/ Yes sir./ Is it true that you wrote her a personal letter dated 19 february 1953, in which you mentioned the possibility of two men whom you knew and worked with in the State Department being ‘top-Communists’/ Yes sir, but I . . ./ And did you use it in reference to these two men who had been your close associates?/ But I . . .

But I . . .

But I . . .

Well God knows, if we go under, I hope to be sitting right here in Blackberry Hill listening to the furnace bubble, even if I’m burning books in it, and books aren’t going to be much good much longer for anything else.

Nevertheless

Nevertheless

Nevertheless

I’m writing one and I’d better get at it, so it can be published, because it will have lots and lots of pages and each one a moment of heat.

Spain by Assumption Day. Spain or Belleview-vue. Or the attached.

de minimis non curat lex,

W.

McCarthy-trial programme: in 1953 Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was conducting highly publicized hearings that attempted by intimidation and innuendo to expose secret Communists among mostly innocent U.S. citizens.

Voice of America
: the U.S. government’s official radio/television broadcasting service. Regarded by some as a vehicle for U.S. propaganda, McCarthy suspected it was influenced by Communists, and several VOA employees were grilled before television cameras.

Elmer Davis: American reporter (1890–1958) and a harsh critic of McCarthy’s witch-hunting tactics. As noted earlier, he hired WG to work on
America Illustrated.

Dale Carnegie business: WG’s critique of Carnegie in
R
(498–503) could be misconstrued as an attack on American values.

Martin Dworkin: American writer and editor (1921–96), whom WG met while both were working at
America Illustrated
. Dworkin became a close friend and confidant of WG, and also took the author’s photo that accompanied some reviews of
R.
See Looks’s
Triumph through Adversity
.

Assumption Day: 15 August, in reference to WG’s hope of returning to Spain with Charles Socarides that summer.

Belleview-vue: Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in Manhattan.

de minimis non curat lex: Latin, “the law does not concern itself with trifles”: a legal maxim, and the implied punchline for a limerick in
R
(523).

the attached: a brief newspaper clipping about a colonial-era Harvard janitor who drank himself to death.

To Edith Gaddis

[Montgomery, NY]

13 March 1953

dear Mother,

Very glad with your call last night, & to know that everything is in order again down there; it took me a couple of days to recover.

This isn’t of course imperative, but if you could manage without searching at length a libretto of Wagner’s
Flying Dutchman
—you know I’ve had it on my mind for some time and should have sought it out myself by now. And only if you come upon a cheap paper copy (like those in Massapequa)—otherwise I can get hold of it in a library I should think.

Peaceful here as I said, thank heaven, and chapter 18 taking up, though it is so difficult because it takes place in Spain, and by now the mere thought of Spain, let alone trying to write of it, drives me wild.

Rain here, which is to the good, keeps me indoors.

love,

W

Wagner’s
Flying Dutchman
: the German composer’s first major opera (1843) and alluded to often in
R
(93, 393, 550–51, 895). In a letter dated 17 April 1953, WG thanks his mother “for
Flying Dutchman
and
Tosca
, very much what I wanted, though the first is as bad as the second is good. & so I go on, singing Vissi d’arte; o dear yes, and stewing the chicken bones.” Giacomo Puccini’s
Tosca
(1900) also plays an important role in
R,
especially Tosca’s aria beginning “Vissi d’arte” (“I lived for art”).

chapter 18: these chapter numbers don’t correspond to the published novel.

To Helen Parker

[Montgomery, NY]

13 April 1953

dear Helen.

It goes on, except for turning cold, wet, the furnace out, the fireplace wood wet, and everything quite commensurately springlike, now that we’ve got through the lilies of purity and the resurrection, and must get along with the afterlife. You were sweet to call, and I must apologise for my doltish end of the conversation, though I think my plea of being but half wakened, and rather chilled at that, must be acceptable?

Otherwise things remain severely peaceful, and until recently, when woodchucks appeared, no distraction from writing novels but reading them. Whether recent choices have been happy ones I’m still unsure:
Oblomov
first, which remains as wondrous as it was those years ago, though conducive to the worst temptations of laziness. Next, de Sade’s
Justine
, and that I believe definitely not the thing to manage in such solitude sustained, the only cure a good long walk, chopping up a tree, or firing a shotgun at woodchucks—but the winter’s about done, and I’ve not gone off my head, or drunk myself to death either, I drink very little here in fact, except when Mrs Woodburn and my mother appear, then the cocktail hour comes instead of the coffee.