B007RT1UH4 EBOK (75 page)

$2300: about $13,000 today.

To Matthew Gaddis

[
WG’s son (1958– ), then living with his mother and sister near Boston.
]

Piermont, NY

17 Sept. 70

Dear Matthew.

Well, I got through
my
first day of school! And at last I have done something I never quite had the nerve to do, walked into a classroom with about 15 people simply sitting, waiting; got behind my desk, hung up my umbrella, sat down facing them, and . . . started to talk. I guess they were surprised to hear me start off by telling them I was there to try to teach something that I didn’t really believe could be taught, writing fiction. And then go on about some examples of good fiction and bad fiction, and everyone sitting there just looking at me. Silence. Start talking again. Finally I asked a couple of questions and got a couple of them talking, and certainly it will all be easier as I go on, next week and the week after, and when I see some of their work. They are college juniors and seniors, and it is different than teaching at Connecticut was because there I saw each person separately, and didn’t sit up in front like The Authority. Even though right now it is a little nerve-wracking, it is good experience for me. Mainly I hope I can be some help to some of them with their early efforts at trying to write, though the only point I’ve pressed on them so far is that the first important and often difficult thing about it is simply sitting down and
doing
it.

Even for me. Here I am in what is just about perfect, after that upstairs bedroom, —this garage room is so big and light, books on shelves, long table spread out and clear of everything but work, clock, calendar, pencils, typewriter, and such a neat room to pace up and down in even though here and there you do almost fall through the soft spots in the floor under the rug. So my main problem is trying to get used to how neat it is to have this big orderly room of my own and get down to work again, and I’m slowly managing that.

Speaking of work, I had a call yesterday from good old Hunter Low, with a speech for the president of Eastman Kodak they want me to write, and it seemed like a good idea to take it for a lot of reasons so next week I’ll spend a couple of days in Rochester. Sometimes a piece of routine work like that with a deadline is a good thing (also they pay me) so I’m glad it came along right now. [...]

with much love again

Papa

To Sarah Gaddis

[
Enclosed with a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s posthumously published miscellany
The Crack-Up
(New Directions, 1945).
]

Piermont NY

17 Sept 70

Dear Sarah.

Here is a book I’ve meant to get you a look at since you talked of keeping a sort of notebook journal. Obviously it’s not for you to sit down and read straight through but I thought you would be interested in what one writer turned the idea into and continue and expand your own along the lines of catching ideas, impressions, thoughts, images, words and combinations of words and overheard remarks and stories and anecdotes at that instant you encounter them, which is so often one you can never recreate purely from memory and may in fact lose forever. Of course in this case, assuming Fitzgerald never expected these notes to be published, I think you find a lot of material which he would have reconsidered and thrown out and never wanted published; but at least, having written them down, he gave himself that choice, rather than putting himself through those long moments of trying to remember —What
was
it? that remark I heard yesterday, that idea I had last night . . . What is it that makes end of summer at Fire Island unlike anywhere else, and yet like a concentration of the whole idea of summer’s end everywhere . . . [...]

See you soon, much love,
write!

Papa

To Jean Lambert

[
The French translator of
R
, which was published in two volumes as
Les Reconnaissances
by Gallimard in 1973. This letter was reproduced in facsimile in a special issue of the French journal
Profils américaines
devoted to Gaddis (no. 6, autumn 1994, 5). In the same issue, Lambert has an essay entitled “Notes du traducteur de
The Recognitions
” (63–71). At the time of this letter, Lambert was at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
]

Piermont, New York 10968

10 February 1971

Dear Mr Lambert.

You may imagine how pleased I was to have your letter with news that the French translation of
The Recognitions
has been completed; it is so long since I signed the agreement with Gallimard that I had almost given up hope and had, of course, no idea that you or anyone in this country were working on it. (I last heard from the German publisher, incidentally, that they were making a third attempt at a translation.)

All this makes me realize not only what a difficult task it has presented, but my good fortune in the care you have given it, since clearly any success the book may have in France will be so largely due to your efforts. And of course I would like to see your translation and to be of any help I can. I must add however that I am not (as some reviewers seemed to think) fluent in the various languages that appear here and there in the book, including the fragments of French; but I might of course be of some help in explaining my use of an English word or phrase that has caused difficulty so that its translation may be more exact. (I think I was of some help to the Italian translator in this way.) And I am of course extremely curious as to how you have translated the title.

At any rate it would give me immense pleasure simply to see the translation and to meet you. However, I expect to leave in a day or two and to be away until around the end of March, and I don’t want to delay or inconvenience you and any schedule you may have with the publisher. And so you might let me know if it would be convenient for me to drive up sometime early in April to meet you and talk about it all, as I should very much like to do.

Since I can not thank you enough for the work you have done for my novel, let me thank you at least for your letter, and I hope we may meet in April.

Yours,

William Gaddis

Judith and WG in a scene from Bill Gunn’s
Ganja and Hess
, filmed in spring 1972 in Croton-on-Hudson.

To Jeanne G. Howes

[
A student at Case Western Reserve University who was writing a thesis on
R
. She mailed her letter on 27 December 1971.
]

Piermont NY 10968

8 March 1972

Dear Miss Howes.

I apologise for being so long with an answer to your very kind and gratifying letter, in fact I look now at its date and am even more apologetic than I began.

And so I wish I could respond more satisfactorily than you will find this. First all I have published beyond
The Recognitions
is the opening passage (about 60 pages) of the novel I am wringing head and hands over now trying to finish before summer. The title is
J.R.
and the passage appeared in something called
Dutton Review
(No. 1) about a year or year and a half ago. I gather its distribution wasn’t awfully impressive but even should you come across a copy you would probably find it a good deal different to the first book.

Otherwise I think you are right, there hasn’t been a great deal written about the book though there may be some bibliography in a piece under my name in
Contemporary Authors
(Gale) vols. 19–20 (c. 1968). I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which
The Recognitions
’ debt to
Ulysses
was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read
Ulysses
but that was a problem that seemed to dog the book from the start largely, I suppose, from a blurb on the back making the comparison on which most reviewers seized with glee in finding my book wanting. A young man named Koenig did last year write his doctoral thesis on it at New York University but I would imagine it being available only there and, of course, it is his interpretation as yours must be yours.

Otherwise I scarcely know what to say to your request for help on ‘more background’ first, I think, and I am not being facetious when I plead not that it’s so long since I wrote it but that [
following a strikeover
] (I’ve been typing all day and getting a little bleary) so long since I read it. If I named a single influence it would certainly be TS Eliot who still takes my breath away as he did then (and as a fair number of his lines sprinkled through the book might attest). Regarding any ‘message’, perhaps that art abides and the artist is its tool and victim but despite that it is the only enterprise worth embracing in the attempt to justify life; that art executed without love is bad (false) art but such love is not easy to come by. There was a corollary there too with God (perfection, gold) and the driving impossibility of grasping it because of our finite condition but that attempt being all we have to justify this finite condition (page 689 at the top I suppose is the key to the book if there is such). And in taking it down just now to look for this reference I read a few pages at random and must confess found them quite entertaining. I suppose if there has been one immense frustration with the book’s often grudging acceptance it has been how few people seemed able to permit themselves, despite its so-called ‘erudition’, to simply enjoy it.

Thank you again for your interest and your good letter and I wish I could have been more help.

Yours,

William Gaddis