B007RT1UH4 EBOK (58 page)

To give you a brief idea: I was born in New York City (1922), educated largely in New England, after three and a half years at Harvard College came to work for the
New Yorker
magazine (1945) where I spent about a year and a half in fact-editing. In 1947–8 I was in Central America, and after that spent a year in Spain. In 1949–50 I lived in Paris and wrote free-lance for the United Nations organization (Unesco) radio and news services. I returned to Spain for that winter, and the following spring went to Tunisia and Libya to work on a documentary film. Returned to New York the following winter (1951–2), I wrote pieces (in English) for the State Department’s Russian- and Arabic-language publication
America
. Since that time I have been entirely occupied with this novel, on which I had been working intermittently for five years.

Aside from this long book, the work I have done, and that which interests me the most now, is creative-fact writing with an interested purpose, similar to those alluded to above. The work in Paris was, of course, general. The film made in North Africa was for an English paper company. The pieces for
America
were of course propaganda, such things as (for the Russian edition) one on the play made from Melville’s
Billy Budd
; for the Arabic, one on racing cars in this country. I am unencumbered, speak and read French and Spanish, and if travel is involved should prefer Latin America, whose culture I am more familiar with than others.

If these qualifications interest you with relation to possibilities in the work your firm is doing, I should greatly appreciate talking with you, and shall telephone your office at the beginning of the coming week to find a time convenient to you for an appointment.

To John Napper

Box 223

Massapequa, Long Island

16 September 1954

dear John,

I trust you and Pauline are by now back from that tour of Titians and Moselles? and thanks for the tormenting picture card; how many years must go by finding these temptations in my mail and returning to sit and “plan”—waiting: this present waiting is perhaps the worst so far, the book due out not until February, and I’ve no plans nor inspirations for the winter. Certainly not, at this moment, to sit down to construct another half million word anagram. But I have just got word that Fred Warburg (Secker & Warburg) are taking it, and though his plan sounds fairly ill-starred (to make it a 35/ book, and my royalty on the first 2 thousand copies about 1/8d!): but the payment of £200 on publication, a sursum corda indeed and one which lets me at least consider coming to England this winter. (For I don’t especially relish being here to make a fool of myself in February.) —So at least it is possible. Though there is a considerable amount of living to be got through before that.

Here I might say with Thoreau “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well” but still you see there is no news. And believe me since at this point the only kind of news which would have significance would be news of money, you will be among the first to hear it, for one of the first expenditures will be a passage on some tramp moving vaguely in yr direction. It is strange, with the chill of the year setting in which always means I must move in some direction (going where the climate suits my clothes), to be quite totally unemployed, spiritually, “gainfully”, amorously, or even the real work. But as careful in all these fields not to accept employment simply for employment’s sake, I see too much of that around me here. Well, read this only as a sort of preface to something more decisive within the next few months. And how I hope that it may be a move in that direction if only for the winter. I do so look forward to seeing and talking with you both again even if not Chantry Mill’s flush of youth (I feel chilly and grown old) nonetheless all love and best wishes and hopes to see you both.

W.

Titians and Moselles: the Italian painter (c. 1488–1576) and presumably Moselle, a region in northeast France. 35/ [...] £200: 35 shillings, around $50 in today’s terms; £200 = around $6,000 today. sursum corda: Latin, “lift up your hearts.”

Thoreau [...] as well: from the opening page of
Walden
(1854).

To Patricia Thompson Black

[
WG’s future wife (1928–2000), a model and actress who had come to New York from North Carolina to break into theater.
Insatiability
, a 1930 novel by Polish novelist Stanislaw Witkiewicz, features “Murti-Bing” pills that sedate previously unhappy people, especially intellectuals; Czeslaw Milosz discussed both
Insatiability
and the Murti-Bing pill (a symbol for communism) in “The Happiness Pill” in the
Partisan Review
(1951), which WG read (as he told me when I inquired about the reference to Murti-Bing on page 569 of
R
; he never read Witkiewicz’s novel). The piece was reprinted as the first chapter of Milosz’s
The Captive Mind
(Knopf, 1953).
]

[New York, NY]

29 October 1954

dear Pat,

Here it is: I mean the letter in y
^r
mailbox which you mentioned. But also, if you are going to wade into that book, I had meant to give you this pamphlet: I think the two worlds are much the same, that &
Insatiability
, though I wasn’t clever enough to devise anything as splendid as Murti Bing—

I didn’t mean to keep you out listening to that fool piano last night so late (that’s not true, of course I did) at any rate I hope you did get things arranged & settled & prepared for this Brunswick stew, without too many recriminations, because I enjoyed so much being with you. But there! Pluto, I believe, will soon be out of the ascendent, and we can all get breath, possibly to find it not all totally absurd after all.

Your fashion photographs were very impressive, & I wish you the best weather for y
^r
jaunt on Sunday. Meanwhile it is strange indeed on this quiet & beautifully grey afternoon, to think that you are somewhere, at this very instant, being real.

W.G.

To John Napper

(this winter:) 210 East 26th Street

New York City

15 December 1954

dear John

Of course, I am not on board anything bound in that direction, and heaven knows when I ever shall. These I am afraid are the moments one suspects that youth is gone indeed, & it is time at last to settle down to something with an income attached. But you may imagine the suspense, with this book due for publication in March here, and copies of it already spread out among “critics” &c, so that I am constantly hearing fragmentary reports & remarks kind & otherwise of course, but even the kindest ones haven’t a penny attached, and that, certainly, is one of the oldest problems of the artist.

But I must tell you, that in spite of my insignifance with my publishers now the thing is done (though they insured my life when I was working on it!), I did prevail upon them to send you an advance reading copy (paper-bound), and I hope you will——what? not, I’m afraid, “enjoy” it, for in spite of my own feelings about its entertainment value, I gather it is not a book people will “like”. And there are mistakes, I mean aside from grammar, or historical accuracy: aesthetic mistakes. The bulk could have been cut down greatly, and some of the tiresome sophomorics which betray it as a first novel removed (& some of [them] were in fact written 4 or 5 years ago). But I knew that if I settled down to do that, it might well end up the MS in the bottom bureau drawer. And so best to get rid of it, with all its mistakes, and set forth with the Iron Duke’s admonition, Publish and be damned, ringing in one’s ears from the outset——And what sense would there be here in writing an apology for a book which took 7 years trying to explain itself to me? So at last I suppose not fare well but fare forward——[...]

W.

Iron Duke’s admonition: one of the “sayings of Great Englishmen” recorded in WG’s mid-December 1950 letter to Napper.

not fare well but fare forward: the concluding lines of part 3 of “The Dry Salvages.”

To J. Robert Oppenheimer

[
American physicist (1904–67), known for his work on the atomic bomb. On 26 December 1954 he gave a lecture entitled “Prospects in the Arts and Sciences” at Columbia University’s bicentennial anniversary celebration, reprinted in his book
The Open Mind
(1955). The following letter is a corrected draft.
]