B007RT1UH4 EBOK (66 page)

Already (in the arts) I look back on too many false hopes fragmented, lost; by circumstance, by definition almost, I’ve forced my family to share them; should I, with a hope-against-hope, desperate-for-time, escape-inflated yes to your proposal, ask you to share yet another one? and in terms of money as earnest of your own enthusiastic confidence? Oh, if only I were really streaked with the confidence-man stripe of the real artist, but the same New England chill blows over that that chills the art itself.

Here are the books and if you do some way go ahead with it now I wish the best success to it, and if you don’t before I beat out the plowshares of my own frustrations we can talk about it in any direction it takes us, and that at your convenience any time except weekends, but a week-day drink? supper at one of those borderline Hungarian bistros?

with best wishes from me and us all,

W G

H G Wells: quoted 28 November 1950.

To Charles Monaghan

[
Informed by WG that MacGibbon & Kee agreed to publish
R
in England, Monaghan warned him of possible negative reactions by the British press and suggested enlisting eminent British writers like Colin Wilson on its side. In the fall of 1961, WG and family had moved from Manhattan to a small town 20 miles north; they were at this address until fall 1967.
]

114 North Highland Place

Croton-on-Hudson, N Y

25 January 1962

Dear Charles Monaghan.

Thanks for your letter—and the spirit of the revanche that fills it. Negociations with MacGibbon & Kee are just about completed though I do not know their publishing date, I should think it will be some time in the fall. And my own approach, even here, has been to pull back somewhat and see what developments if any there will be without my intrusion, expecting paperback copies in the stores the last week of February. Asher will of course not pause for proof copies but I would think there will be a usable gap between paper copies here and MacGibbon & Kee’s publication so that O’Keefe can hand round Meridian editions as pre-publication copies there. But my whole inclination right now is to wait to hear O’Keefe’s plan of attack and since as I remember you know him he will probably be the best person to talk to about your ideas. Though from what I’ve seen I thoroughly agree that the social messagenicks are rampant there in England though I believe even more vigourous and apparently high handed than here, here after all they are so largely resentful remnants of the past and relegated wherever there is intelligence and taste as nagging bores, Britain apparently is quite different, a nice cultural lag and like it or not I suppose I’m in the Colin Wilson camp? Jack Green should have before Meridian’s publication an issue of his
newspaper
30pp or so attacking the US no-nothing reviews of the book in 1955, which might be fuel for the British fire but again, I’m inclined to wait and see, and similarly to postpone satisfaction on the Bogus F. Warburg score. At any rate unless something else rears before that I’ll let you know of anything above a whisper here come late next month, and send a copy of
newspaper
immediately I have it.

And yes, Croton is salutary.

very best regards.

W. Gaddis.

To Aaron Asher

[
A note on WG’s personalized memo stationery attached to the first installment of Jack Green’s
Fire the Bastards!]

27 February 1962

Aaron—

Here at last—a la revanche! You might get a rise out of those mentioned, especially the provincials if they thought they were being dignified by attacks in sin capital Greenwich Village, ho! (I gather the Hicks & Highets come later.)

WG.

Highets: Gilbert Highet attacked
R
in the
Book of the Month Club News
; Green does indeed deal with him and Granville Hicks in part 2.

To John D. Seelye

[
Seelye wrote on 26 April to congratulate WG on the publication of the Meridian
R
and the piece on WG that appeared in the
Saturday Review
(April 21, 8–9). He enclosed two clippings: his own essay “Plight of ‘Neglected’ Author,”
Berkeley Daily Gazette
, 16 February 1962, 11, which mentions WG in passing, and a article by William Hogan entitled “Recognition for ‘The Recognitions’” that appeared in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, 26 April 1962, 41.
]

Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

21 May 1962

Dear Mr Seelye.

I’ve been so inexcusably poor about writing that at this point it would be graceless even for me to apologise; as graceless as it would be for me to in some way ‘thank’ you for the piece in the Berkeley paper, though I can certainly say of that that it becomes more instead of less refreshing measured against the froth of most of the enclosed, which you may have seen and which you note when it is about the book is only about the book as an object, a Thing, generally the kind of nonsense though which increases sales (if not readership) so I am not carping, much. Irritation though at such as the Dolbier bit of patent phonyness (he’d referred to
The Recognitions
by William Gibson in a
Saturday Review
splash 7 years ago), now the ‘12 years . . . 976 pages . . .’ and the rest the sort of blurb writing he evidently hopes will be picked up in advertising, his (name in) bold face on 10,000 dust jackets, though why the antics of these finks continue to annoy me I do not know, I wrote that book once. Still find it revived (the rancour) at yesterday’s brown-nose on Sunday
Times Book Review
front-page lesson on how a best seller is manufactured (v. the interior $000000 two-page ad for the same Wouk of art, if you’ll pardon the) lesson on how, if
that
can be seriously flung broadcast as a saga of artist’s life USA then of course
The Recognitions
must appear sprawling, ‘turbulent, Joycean’, lesson on how to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

Enough of this, it only points up the abyss of which others, composers say, are constantly aware. On the Joyce tack (I may have written you this before) I was distressed at the time of the original publication when Harcourt used the best blurb-quote they had, which proved to be Stuart Gilbert, unfurled across the back of the jacket as a sales pitch but which, as I anticipated, only gave reviewers an escape hatch from which to say ‘. . . Joyce . . . , and I didn’t understand this either’ (ie ‘because it’s like Joyce,’ not ‘because I didn’t read it’), though I recall being jolted to find even the
New Yorker
(I believe Brendan Gill) taking this recourse, rather more snottily than the others to be sure but riding the comparison even to typography (—instead of “).

But this frankly is the sort of controversy I would wish to keep myself apart from: I remember Robert Graves once writing (‘Letter to the editor’) that he answered critics &c only when they mis-took his facts and that seems to me the only sane approach, otherwise I threaten to become a character in the book which is largely about, after all, the “that is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all . . .” I can say, my Joyce is limited to
Dubliners
and some of his letters, but that is not the kind of fact I mean; as pointless really as would have been writing to protest
Time
magazine’s “Mr Pivner, the all-too-common man, is a try at redoing Joyce’s Mr Bloom . . .” with the confidence that it was ‘in fact’ a try at redoing my own experience with my father, transmuted, as seemed permissible, with trivia. “. . . complex, but hardly obscure” as you say, I agree. The overwhelming fact is that there the book is, quite apart from me (cf. top of page 96) and better God knows a battleground for the likes of you and Jack Green than the Dolbiers, amen.

(Though I append this: I met a woman here some months ago you might know of, name of June Oppen Degnan & pub’r of the
San Francisco Review
165-28th Avenue, S F 21, who seemed quite impressed by the book (“remarkable, fascinating, important . . .”) and might if you were so inclined be interested in any critical work you did on it for
S F Review
.)

Otherwise? It’s to be published this fall in England by MacGibbon & Kee, and a refugee from NY bundle of great energy and if I may say allegiance to it named Charles Monaghan is trouncing possible critics reviewers newspapers &c beforehand in hopes of a firework or 2 mounting the mandarins against the liblabs, ho!

No, no short stories or whatnot published elsewhere ever; a novel on business begun and dropped in about ”57; a novel begun, rebuilt into an impossibly long play (very rear guard, Socrates in the US Civil War), shelved 1960; current obsession with expanding prospects of programmed society & automation in the arts which may bring an advance, a commitment, even an escape from the tomb of the 9-to-5.

Since my past delinquency in correspondence has made clear that your interest in and efforts regarding the book aren’t swayed one way or another by the winds of my appreciation let me say here they continue blowing wholeheartedly.

Yours,

W Gaddis