B007RT1UH4 EBOK (57 page)

What the spring will bring I haven’t a notion (though my horoscope is encouraging). Finally, when I’d given up all hope of such a thing, I did meet the most beautiful girl in the world, the only one who might have saved me from my ambition. But she solved all that, she won’t have me. The only thing I have to counter at the moment is a friend who has a friend who has an asphalt pit outside of Marakesh, where I can go right ahead with my ambition and become a dirty old man as fast as nature will allow. Otherwise I keep pretty much alone; and after some of the antics I’ve performed in nice company am now being encouraged to do so. Well damn their eyes, it’s not I who’ve lost Athens, Athens is losing me . . . oops!

Forgive the petulant tone in all this; I know it will lapse into brightness when this work’s done. Thanks again for your thoughtful cheer of almond paste from the only place worth
being
. And every possible best wish for now and the new year to you and Pauline.

love to you both,

W.G.

Ivan Morris: a British author and translator from the Japanese (1925–76) who spent many years in America. WG quotes from his book
The Nobility of Failure
(1975) in “The Rush for Second Place” (
RSP
57).

jotas: regional Spanish folk songs, usually in waltz time.

Duke of Gloucester [...] Mr Gibbon: an anecdote about the eminent British historian that WG probably found in ODQ; he liked it enough to call a pre-pub section of
J R
“Un-titled Fragment from Another Damned, Thick, Square Book” (
Antæus
13/14, Spring/Summer 1974).

collexion of books: see Jack Kerouac’s novel
The Subterraneans
(Grove Press, 1958), 93, for a description of Ansen’s impressive library; WG was the model for “Harold Sand” in this novel, which records events of a few days in August 1953.

it’s not I who have lost Athens: so reportedly said the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (500–428
BCE
) after the Athenians banished him for impiety.

To Barney Emmart

Woodmere, Long Island

[January/February 1954]

dear Barney,

Saturday afternoon, and your shocking letter, for I’d no idea of it. I’m seldom enough in the San Remo anyhow, and haven’t been in some time, haven’t been doing anything but working, or trying to work, sick and tired of it, of most anything. The weather’s been so bad that, going in town last evening for dinner, I took the train, which meant that on my usual late round I didn’t make all the usual stops, as I do with a car; but only a few 3
^d
avenue bars, & so home. Christ, I don’t know. And even enough before your note here, I’ve been walking up and down the library listening to Gluck’s
Orphée
with a glass of whisky (thank God I was provident!) and saying that, just saying, —I don’t know. And I don’t. I’m just so tired of all these things which repeat and confirm this desolation we try by such ingenuous ruses to belie.

Curiously though, if my first reading of your note brought on a sickish feeling, I found that on the second or third something different, a sclerosis of the heart: and, —there . . . that is the way it is, and all our skipping and dancing and sending flowers and wearing clean linen . . . and keeping our desolation locked in, doesn’t work; or at any rate it doesn’t work there, on them, the way we’ve been brought up to expect it to. I feel like a tired old fool sitting here, with no counsel for either of us but back to the books, and Chryssipus, and dieting to extinction.

I’ve felt the life gone out of me for months now, well since the fall of last year. This ‘work’ bores me infinitely, a lousy long boring pretentious adolescent parade of attempts at experience; and other people become for me more strange and more distant and more delicately contrived than I dare think on. Chilly and grown old: because I thought I’d come to life for a little while, last September or so, the way you were so recently: and now? are there finally just these things: books, whisky, music & tobacco.

The only reading I’ve been able to settle to is Shakespear. [
Letter breaks off
.]

Gluck’s Orphée:
Orphée et Eurydice
, a French reworking of German composer Christoph Gluck’s 1762 opera on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice; alluded to in
R
(205).

Chryssipus: Chrysippus was a Greek Stoic philosopher of the third century
BCE
; subject of an anecdote in
R
(352).

chilly and grown old: another quotation from the final stanza of Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s.”

To John Napper

Woodmere, Long Island

30 March 1954

dear John,

Here with all the news, which includes exactly nothing, but I thought I might at the least write assuring you of that, lest you think something had occurred. Though I don’t believe I have written you since I turned the entire 10pounds of manuscript over to Harcourt Brace, & the whole thing is now their problem. It comes we find to some half-million words, some thousand printed pages, some 7$–10$—(the £3 novel) per copy I’m afraid, which assures it against anything so vulgar as a popular success. Presently being prepared for the press, I expect to be pouring through galleys in June; but publication has been put ahead to January, so that they can campaign for it: something I don’t object to, but shall certainly not participate in. But there should be sewn (unbound) copies by August or September.

As for England!—I had a very pleasant dinner (pleasant, that is I was allowed to talk about my book for 2 hours) a few weeks ago with Mr Fred Warburg, we got on extremely well, & I believe he is going to take it for Secker & Warburg. So there is little more to do or think about.

But I’ve wondered how near the feeling of absurdity & bereavement which I’m coddling now may correspond to any you may have upon finishing (abandoning) & letting go a large painting which has taken possibly years? I spend days now wandering up & down this library, hearing a piece of music half through & change it for another; read 20 pages in one book, 50 in another, then sit down & read 4 novels straight through. I believe I could go on this way for some time were it not for that most usual cursed blessing which summons such vagrant minds to reality, & of course I mean money. Until now it has not greatly mattered, I mean I was bent on any ruse so long as I could work & getting that finished was the only importance. Now? Well, trying to turn my head to “creative” mercenary purpose seems quite a futile thing. But here! I don’t mean to sound plaintive: simply this curious sense of living in a vacuum, & a not uncommon one in these circumstances I imagine; but am constrained to wonder how long it will go on. Until I have got to the last penny of what I’ve recently borrowed I suppose. But this is a really idiotic convalescence.

Of course accompanied by the usual phantasies: the “Hollywood gives me $5000000 ” (a raving impossibility incidentally) & I set sail for Gibraltar, spend the summer in Spain, & thence to London to spend the winter studying at the University, &c. — — — The prospect of being here in New York when the thing is published is something I certainly hope to avoid, for all the best & the worst reasons, & presently, the prospect of wandering the pavements of that city begging work is something so unattractive that I cannot contain it long enough to do it. Though ultimately how idiotic to break one’s neck getting & keeping a 75$ a week job when it costs all of that to live—& not awfully well—in that city; while I can subsist on 20 a week in the country. Well, this is no new nor certainly unique problem; & with no piece of work on my mind I’m not even vaguely desperate, perhaps I should be? Not yet.

Does this all sound carping & complaining? Lord, I don’t mean it to. I’m really in good spirits, if undirected & indifferent just now, until those moments of Look, look! wenches! —Then (What we want is a bank account, & a bit of skirt in a taxi—) Meanwhile, I leave this house in 3 weeks or so & return to the barn in Massapequa (box 223), to pick up the usual childhood threads, though feeling rather chilly & grown old.

Nonetheless every warm & best wish to you & Pauline.

W.G.

7$–10$:
R
was priced at $7.50 at a time when most hardback novels cost between $3.00 and $5.00.

Fred Warburg: Fredric Warburg (1898–1991), one of the leading literary publishers in England. His initial enthusiasm for
R
waned, and it wasn’t published in England until 1962 (by MacGibbon & Kee).

Look, look! wenches!: from the epigraph to Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect” (1919), taken in turn from
The Maid’s Tragedy
by Beaumont and Fletcher (1619).

What we want [...] skirt in a taxi: line 10 of Irish poet Louis MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music” (1937).

To Fred Palmer

[
An executive at Earl Newson & Company, a Manhattan public relations firm. The following is a corrected draft, not the mailed letter. WG was acting on a suggestion by William Haygood, who had returned from Spain and was now working in public relations, that he pursue a job in that field. WG eschews his usual British orthography.
]

[April/May? 1954]

Dear Sir.

I have recently been told that your firm is interested in writers for work on fairly extensive projects. However, I did not learn the exact nature of the work, and should be very interested to talk to you about it. A few weeks ago I finished work on a long book, a novel, to be published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., and am now interested in continuing with the sort of work I have done in the past few years.